If the days always last 24 hours, there is often no time. This is why this region asked the European Commission to gain two additional hours.
24-hour days are sometimes too short to have time to do all your planning. Some would dream of having longer days to increase the number of activities. This is the wish that one of the regions of a European country has just made. She made a request to the European Commission to establish a new time zone with days of two additional hours, or 26 hours.
The goal is simple: to give residents more time. This extension would be justified by a “particular feeling of peace and tranquility which allows a different conception of time”. This would allow locals to enjoy “activities such as fishing, hunting, learning new languages or simply being with loved ones”, underlined Wenche Pedersen, mayor of the town of Vadso, Norway, who formulated this funny request, according to Politico.
She would like to share the way of life in her region: “We don’t run after buses or trains and we don’t have to take a long time to get to work. We are very happy to live in a part of Norway where we have more time to be with our friends, with our family and together,” she explained. She wants to attract new arrivals because the city is quite isolated and is located near the Russian border. But is this practically possible? The implementation of the project is currently not very successful. “The clock will go from 12 to 13… and we have to see how that happens,” the elected official simply explained. “I don’t think they will say yes, so we haven’t thought through all the details,” admitted the mayor.
Norway is not an EU member country but is part of the European Economic Area (EEA). Politico reports that, according to a European Commission official, time zones are actually up to the countries themselves. It is therefore unlikely that the EU will be able to grant such a request.
However, this could well happen one day. According to scientists from the Technical University of Munich, the Earth’s rotation is experiencing changes that could lead to longer days on our planet. The length of days on Earth has already varied considerably over the millennia. In the age of dinosaurs it lasted 23 hours and research suggests that in the future it could extend to 25 and probably 26 hours.
The progressive decrease in the speed of rotation of the Earth, which is estimated at approximately 1.7 milliseconds per century, is notably linked to the gravitational interaction between the Earth and the Moon but also to seismic activity and even atmospheric circulation. .