December 9, 1999

Competition Is on to Claim New Millennium´s First Sunbeams

GISBORNE CITY, New Zealand -- The first sunrise of the new millennium will be a cold and lonely moment as the midnight sun dips below the horizon near Dibble Glacier in Antarctica, and then, a few minutes later, creeps up again.

At the edge of the international date line, the silent Antarctic dawn will take place 14 hours before the big ball descends to mark the New Year in Times Square -- and more than 21 hours before the sun rises in New York at 7:20 a.m. on Jan. 1, 2000.

But no one is likely to be there on that distant glacier to see the century's first dawn.

This has touched off a rough and tumble competition among the islands of the South Pacific for the claim of being the first inhabited place to witness the first fresh sunbeams of the future.

Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati and New Zealand's Pitt Island, near here (the astronomers' favorite), are the main contenders. In another part of the world, Katchall Island in the Indian Ocean is using a different theory of time to claim the first island sunrise. It has its scientific backers, too.

Like the millennium itself, which purists point out does not begin for another year, the competition is a matter of definitions and technicalities: First midnight or first dawn? First permanently or temporarily inhabited place? Local time or Greenwich Mean Time?

And, particularly in the case of the often foggy Pitt Island, is there a sunrise if the weather is bad and nobody sees it?

"It's all just a matter of convention, but of course, the whole business of the millennium is a matter of convention," said Dennis McCarthy, director of the Directorate of Time at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. ("We are concerned with keeping the time for the country here," he said, explaining his job title. "So as far as time is concerned, that is what we take care of.")

"Why is the year 2000 the year 2000? It's just a convention established in the sixth century by Dionysius Exiguus," he went on, referring to the Christian theologian who is believed to have introduced the current system of numbering years. "And I think it's pretty much assumed now that he got it wrong, if he actually was referencing the birth of Jesus."

Right or wrong, things have gotten heated in this part of the world as New Year's Eve approaches -- a wild shifting of date lines, time zones and daylight savings times that has produced some strange geographical and temporal contortions.

Here in this easternmost city of New Zealand yet another claim dominates: first city to greet the new century. Or to put it another way, first land mass to see the sunrise.

Looking more like a small town than a city, this quiet settlement of 30,000 people seems a pleasant enough representative for the rest of us to greet the future. It is described repeatedly by residents as "a nice place to raise children."

"Many people in the outside world think we're isolated -- we're glad," said Mike Coyle, a member of the Gisborne District Council. "The younger people, they like to move away, have their excitement, then move back and enjoy their retirement. Or like me you can hop in the car any time, drive seven hours to Auckland, have a whale of a time and be back again on Monday."

But like the designation of Jan. 1, 2000, as the start of the new millennium, all these South Pacific claims are wrong by one key definition.

They are based on local time rather than on Greenwich Mean Time -- or Universal Time, as the scientists, if not the theologians, call it. When the sun rises over the Pacific, it will still be about 3 p.m. on Dec. 31 in Greenwich, England, ground zero for the world's clocks. The new year, and the new century, will not yet have officially arrived.

"The only international standard for time across the world is Universal Time," said Robert Massey, an astronomer at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. "So our argument has always been that the new millennium will begin on Jan. 1 at the stroke of midnight along the Greenwich meridian.

"So the easiest way to measure who is first is to set your clocks to midnight GMT and find out where the sun is rising. That in a sense is the first sunrise."

At that moment, he said, the sun will be rising along a great arc running from eastern Russia through China, down along the border between Burma and Thailand, out into the Indian Ocean and on down to the Antarctic Circle.

Of all the spots on this particular arc, it is Katchall Island, part of India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, that has decided to raise the cry of "first."

But by the time this happens, it will already be midday on Jan. 1 in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Why wait?

Several places in the Pacific are making their own claims.

Pitt Island

The strongest claim appears to belong to Pitt Island, home to fewer than 60 farmers and their sheep. It is a part of New Zealand, but it lies in the blustery seas 500 miles off the coast -- and not much farther than that to the north of Antarctica.

Pitt, the more easterly of the two Chatham Islands, will greet the sunrise at 4:49 a.m. on Jan. 1, or 4:04 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time on Dec. 31. It will be 11:04 a.m. in New York.

"It's simple," asserted Sharon van Gulik, manager of the New Zealand Millennium Office. "Pitt Island and the Chatham Islands are the first legitimately inhabited lands to welcome the dawn of the new millennium."

"Legitimately inhabited," she said, means that those contenders who move a few folk out onto a barren outcropping for the event do not count.

Addressing time changes made by some of her rivals so they can claim to be first, Ms. van Gulik argued: "No matter what time of day you say it is, this is where the sun rises first. No matter what you do to your date line, you can't change the tilt of the earth. You just can't change it."

But although the tilt of the earth may be on their side, the Chatham Islands must contend with a different sort of natural phenomenon. The Chathams are known around here as "the misty islands" and there is a good chance that the sunrise will be obscured by fog.

"That's irrelevant," insisted Ms. Van Gulik gamely. "The sun rises whether or not you and I can see it."

Kiribati

A second claimant is Kiribati (pronounced KIH-rih-bus), a far-flung archipelago that until recently had been divided by the international date line into two separate days. In 1995 it unilaterally extended the date line in an audacious 1,000-mile loop to embrace its easternmost outcropping, Caroline Island, and immediately renamed it Millennium Island.

The sun will rise there at 5:43 a.m. -- or 3:43 p.m. on Dec. 31 in Greenwich -- the first Pacific island, by this reckoning, to greet the dawn.

"There seems to be no legal reason why any country cannot declare itself to be in whatever time zone it likes," the Greenwich observatory said in a statement. But it did not seem happy about it.

The problem with Millennium Island, Massey said, is that "nobody actually lives there." In the first-sunrise sweepstakes, he said, the atoll of 22 rocky islets is the tropical equivalent of Antarctica's barren glacier.

And at Christmas Island, the most easterly of the populated islands of Kiribati, the sun will rise 27 minutes after it does at Pitt.

Tonga

In Tonga, an archipelago of 170 islands, King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV joined the competition in August by introducing daylight saving time, moving the nation's clocks forward to get a head start on the next 1,000 years.

"We've done a bit of research and there's something like 199 nations around the world that have daylight saving time," said Semisi Taumoepeau, Tonga's director of tourism. "It's good for the family, good for productivity and it keeps crime down."

To Tonga's competitors, though, the timing of the change seemed a little suspicious.

Daylight savings time moved Tonga's easternmost islands, the Niutoputapu group, to 14 hours ahead of Greenwich. "While people are having breakfast there, we will already be celebrating the millennium," Semisi said.

Massey, of the Greenwich observatory, was having none of it. "Just because they set their clocks forward doesn't make the sun rise any earlier," he said.

Fiji

The most combative of the entrants is Fiji, where officials say everybody else has the wrong idea. It is not Greenwich time that counts, they say, but the international date line, most of which follows the 180 degree meridian line and which passes through the archipelago at three points. And it is not dawn that counts, but midnight.

"The 180-degree meridian date line is the line where each day starts and ends," declares a government statement addressed To Whom it May Concern. "The whole world counts down to midnight. Who counts down to sunrise? If anything, most people are in bed with a hangover by the time the sun comes up."

To help matters along, Fiji, too, moved its clocks forward.

"Fair enough, good luck to them, it doesn't bother me in the least," Massey said. But he added: "You can affect the midnight time but that won't affect the sunrise time."

The date line, created at an international convention in 1884, is an imaginary north-south line drawn from pole to pole roughly along the 180 degree meridian. This is the farthest point from the "prime meridian," which runs through Greenwich, near London, and where each new day officially begins.

Moving westward across the date line, a traveler loses a day, moving to a point where it is 24 hours later.

Moving eastward a day is gained. It is Sunday today; tomorrow it is Sunday again.

But for reasons of convenience and politics, the dateline zigs and zags away from the meridian -- between Tonga and Samoa, around the Chatham Islands of New Zealand, jogging between Siberia and Alaska and swerving to the east of Fiji. Its newest and most spectacular bulge, encircling the islands of Kiribati, is "ridiculous," the pugnacious Fijians contend.

As these squabbling Pacific islanders are greeting the dawn on Jan. 1, people in the United States may still be asleep on the last cold winter morning of the old century.

The Naval Observatory has calculated that the first sunrise in the continental United States will occur in Maine at 7:04 a.m., simultaneously at Cadillac Mountain near Bar Harbor and at Porcupine Mountain near Lubec. The first big American city to see the new dawn will be Miami Beach, at 7:07 a.m.

The earliest sunrises on American territories will have arrived more than 15 hours earlier, though, on the Pacific islands of Guam and Wake.

Times Square plans to acknowledge many of the Pacific celebrations in its 24-hour countdown, but after all this activity, that countdown there of the last seconds of the year is going to seem a bit late.

But then, what's the hurry? There will be 365,241 more days to greet the dawn before the fourth millennium arrives.

For those of us who rather liked the last one and want to cling to it for a few final hours, the place to be is Falealupo, Samoa, where the sun will set for the last time, at 7:02 p.m.

By then, history will already be hurtling ahead into the unknown. It will be dawn in Greenwich, 6:02 a.m., on Jan. 2, 2000.