Time on Jan Mayen

[Steffen Thorsen]

On Tue, 1 May 2001, Jesper Nørgaard wrote:

> In that case I presume the 'europe' file should be corrected from this:
> 
> # Svalbard & Jan Mayen
> Link	Europe/Oslo	Arctic/Longyearbyen
> # From Whitman:
> # Zone	NAME		GMTOFF	RULES	FORMAT	[UNTIL]
> Zone Atlantic/Jan_Mayen	-1:00	-	EGT
> 
> ... to something like this:
> 
> # Svalbard & Jan Mayen
> Link	Europe/Oslo	Arctic/Longyearbyen
> Link	Europe/Oslo	Atlantic/Jan_Mayen
> 
> The question is if Whitman's observation for Jan Mayen Island was
> correct earlier, in that case we will have to reuse parts of the first
> definition. Although EGT is a bit misleading perhaps because East
> Greenland (Scoresbysund) is using EU rules with DST, which might not
> coincide with what Jan Mayen had. I suggest that this needs to be
> investigated a bit further (hint, hint, I will probably not do it :)

I've tried to research this a bit further, using a public available law
resource for Norway, http://www.lovdata.no (links are in Norwegian)

Although I could not find it explicitly, it seems that Jan Mayen and
Svalbard have been using the same time as Norway at least since the time
they were declared as parts of Norway:

Svalbard was declared as a part of Norway by law of 1925-07-17 no 11, § 4 
and Jan Mayen by law of 1930-02-27 no 2, § 2.
(From http://www.lovdata.no/all/nl-19250717-011.html and
http://www.lovdata.no/all/nl-19300227-002.html )

The law/regulation for normal/standard time in Norway is from 1894-06-29
no 1 (came into operation on 1895-01-01) and Svalbard/Jan Mayen
seem to be a part of this law since 1925/1930.
(From http://www.lovdata.no/all/nl-18940629-001.html )

I have not been able to find if Jan Mayen used a different time zone (e.g.
-0100) before 1930. Jan Mayen has only been "inhabitated" since 1921
by Norwegian meteorologists and maybe used the same time as Norway ever
since 1921... 

Svalbard (Arctic/Longyearbyen) has been inhabited since before 1895, and
therefore probably changed the local time somewhere between 1895 and 1925
(inclusive).

Best regards,
Steffen

-- 
Steffen Thorsen <steffen at thorsen.priv.no> <steffent at pvv.ntnu.no>
http://www.thorsen.priv.no