Story Highlights
- Historical event
- 12 July 1979
- The time zones in Kiribati are set in a way that one part of the country uses the universal time increased by 14 hours (UTC +14). This is the only part of the world in such a time zone, which means that Kiribati is the first state to enter a new day and a new year of all the countries in the world.
The island state of Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean was granted independence on this day in 1979.
This country is particularly interesting for the great dispersal of its islands.
In fact, some islands of Kiribati are some 4,500 kilometers apart, which is almost equal to the distance between Stockholm in Sweden and Kabul in Afghanistan.
The whole country Kiribati extends over approximately 3,500,000 square kilometers of ocean, which exceeds the surface of the entire of India.
Kiribati consists of 33 islands with a total land area only 811 square kilometers, which makes Kiribati one of the smallest countries in the world. The total population is about 106,000.
It is especially interesting that Kiribati is the first world state that enters a new day.
Namely, in 1995, time zones in Kiribati were set in a way that one part of the country uses the universal time increased by 14 hours (UTC +14).
This is the only part of the world in such a time zone, which means that Kiribati is the first state to welcome New Year (it was the first to enter the new millennium on 1 January in 2001).
