[tz] Antarctic research base Vostok local time

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Tue Dec 19 07:42:00 UTC 2023


On 2023-12-18 19:14, АПС АКУЛОВ wrote:
>  >Do you have a public announcement on the web, or some other source, 
> that we can cite?
> Well AARI weekly publishes Antarctic events summaries here: 
> https://www.aari.ru/press-center/news/rae .
> 
> But I am not sure if my case will be mentioned there.

This web page still says that Vostok time is UTC+07:

https://www.aari.ru/ekspeditsii/rossiyskaya-antarkticheskaya-ekspeditsiya-(rae)/vostok

Could you please fix that web page? That would help confirm the change, 
so that when people ask us for our source, we can direct them to aari.ru.


>  >Does "00:00" mean 00:00 local time, or 00:00 UTC?
> 
> My bad, sorry, I missed this point.
> 
> Local time, of source.

OK. Did clocks jump back from 00:00 today to 22:00 the previous day, or 
from 02:00 to 00:00 today?

Also, could you please briefly say why Vostok changed from UTC+07 to 
UTC+05? I would like to document this in commentary.


>  >Has local time at Vostok been UTC+6 ever since 1957, or has it changed 
> before?
> 
> No. At least since my antarctic career start, 10 years ago, Vostok base 
> has UTC+7.

Ouch. TZDB has been wrong for Vostok for at least 10 years. I will try 
to correct this.

(I hope you have not been at Vostok for 10 years! I'd rather live in 
Siberia, or even in Nebraska. I can joke about this, as I was born in 
Nebraska....)

Attached is a draft patch to TZDB to implement these changes. Please let 
us know if you see problems with it. I have not installed this patch 
into the TZDB development repository as it is still preliminary.
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