March 20, 2007--12:07 a.m. Universal Time

I’m so confused.

Here I was, still shivering from last weekend’s ice storm, eagerly looking forward to the beginning of spring, thinking today’s the day—March 20th. But then, thank you very much wise-ass NY Times, I learned that spring will be a little late this year, a little slow arriving: it will begin early in the morning of March 21st. At 12:07 a.m. to be precise. (Article linked below.)

But adding to my confusion is the fact that that will be 12:07 a.m. Universal Time. And since Universal Time is the old Greenwich Mean Time, it means that since Greenwich is in England and four hours later than it is in New York, spring will still arrive here, on schedule at 4:07 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, today, March 20th as it was meant to be. (Incidentally, it really should be arriving at 5:07 a.m. if we hadn’t tampered with our clocks here in America to start Daylight Savings Time a few weeks before the rest of the world.)

You of course know how the seasons work? But in case you missed Earth Science class the day it was taught, here’s the scoop. In spite of what some Fundamentalists claim, the earth revolves around the sun, taking a little more than 365 days to complete a circuit. But the Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the plane of its orbit. This means that at different times of the year the northern half of the globe is more or less tilted toward the sun. And because of that, above and below the equator (where things are always the same in regard to the tilt) we have the seasons.

Spring in the northern hemisphere begins when there are exactly 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night. It is the vernal equinox, Latin for “equal night of spring.” Precisely six months from now we will have the autumnal equinox which will signal the beginning of fall.

So we’ve got that straight, but still I’m confused.

First of all whatever happened to good-old Greenwich Mean Time? It was “created” in 1847 with the mean part of GMT the time the sun more or less crossed the longitudinal meridian in Greenwich, England, a few miles north of London. Since England soon became the world’s hegemonic power, remember “the sun never sets on the British Empire”?, they had the power, in effect, to set the world’s clocks and thus, GMT, which originally served the English railroad system, was universally imposed, as was the time zone system.

But the old system of keeping time, which was done by astronomical means, became obsolete as advances in science, technology, and globalization required a much more precise way of keeping time. One problem is the fact that the earth’s daily rotation is irregular—we wobble a bit on our axis and, more metaphysically interesting, the Earth’s rotation is slowing down (don’t ask what will happen when it really slows down because you won’t like the answer). So in 1972, with England stripped of its empire, GMT was replaced by Coordinated Universal Time and atomic clocks replaced the astronomers of Greenwich.

I understand, but still this feelse sad—the world lost a little of its charm.

But I’m still confused—if as the Times says the vernal equinox occurs on that day when we have equal portions of light and dark, that should mean that the sun must rise at say 7:00 a.m. and set at precisely 7:00 p.m. (or in another year, 7:06 a.m. and 7:06 p.m.). Yet today, also according to the NY Times, the sun rose at 7:00 a.m. but will set at 7:08 p.m. To me, this sounds as if this vernal equinox will have 12 hours and 8 minutes of light, not the 12 it should have.

Does this mean the Earth’s rotation is slowing down even faster than expected? If so, who needs to worry about Global Warming? But then again, maybe all of this confusion is why the Egyptians build the Giant Sphinx to face the sunrise on the vernal equinox and the Druids arranged the monoliths at Stonehenge to serve as their way to know when to start planting their crops.