QUESTION:
What time do you go by?  Military, Eastern, or does
it depend on where on Antarctica you are?

        From Amanda, 4th Grader at Peter Boscow Elementary School
             Hillsboro, Oregon


ANSWER from Robin Ross, LTER Member and UCSB Researcher
            Palmer Station, Antarctica
            Wed, 12 Feb 1997 10:44:14 +0000 (GMT)


Dear Amanda,

What time we go by does depend on where in the Antarctic you are.  Here 
on the Polar Duke we use two kinds of time.  Local time is the same time 
as in Punta Arenas, Chile, where the ship docks.  And that time is 5 
hours ahead of California.  But when we write in our data books to record 
what time a particular sample was taken we use GMT or Greenwich Mean 
Time.  That is the time at the 0 degree meridian in Greenwich, England, 
and is right now 3 hours ahead of our local time.  We use GMT for our 
standard time because it is not affected by daylight savings changes and 
we always have a reference point.  It can get very confusing - especially 
during those times when Chile has gone off daylight savings and the USA 
has not gone on daylight savings!  In general we also use the military 
notation, that of a 24 hour clock, so 2 pm is actually written as 1400.  
That way we don't get confused later about whether an experiment done at 
6 o'clock was done at 0600 or 1800!

Cheers, Robin