What I wanted to know is how many humans share the same local time, for each possible local time. I just wanted to distribute the world population along a simple numerical variable. Looking at this image for too long can cause seizures ©Evan Siroky ( source)Īnyway, this is not what I had in mind when I started this… A graph with the number of people for each possible combination that makes up a time zone would likely be hideous (sorry if you made one and think it’s pretty. The tz database contains close to 400 different time zones, albeit many of which are historical! The maintainers of this collaborative project record regions of the world where local clocks have, since 1970, all been the same. The thing is, time zones are controlled by governments and, on a global scale, they change pretty frequently! 3 It can be further defined as an offset from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), whether to use daylight saving time or not, and if so, when people should set their clocks forward and when they should set it back. In other words it’s an area where people are expected to have their clocks in sync. I looked up online to see if it had already been done and hoped to find a dataset that would allow me to easily plot such a distribution.ĭefinitions vary, but a time zone is generally understood as a region where the same standard time is used. How is the world population distributed across time zones? This was something I wanted to visualize with a bar chart and a map. The other day I was surprised to read that close to 25 percent of the world’s population would enter 2022 at the same time. Distribution of things about World population by time zone

Map of time zone