The Width of a Day · an atlas of the Diomede Islands
Two islands in the Bering Strait. 3.8 kilometres apart. 21 hours apart.
scroll to cross ↓
I.
The width of a day
looking north, from the Bering Sea
Two flat-topped granite islands with steep cliffs, standing in the strait between Asia and North America.
Between them, 3.8 km of cold water. The Iñupiaq name for the smaller island, Iŋaliq, is said to mean “the other one.”
It is already Saturday here.
“Tomorrow Island”
It is still Friday here.
“Yesterday Island”
In English we read from left to right.
Here, that means reading from tomorrow back into today.
your turn
The aim sways on its own. Press and hold to lock it and wind up, then let go. Flat throws skip.
II.
Where days begin
July 1522
The exhausted crew of the Victoria, the last ship of Magellan's fleet, reach the Cape Verde islands. They are nearly home, and about to become the first people to sail all the way around the world.
Antonio Pigafetta has kept a careful journal, day by day. By his count it is Wednesday. The people on shore say it is Thursday.
Nobody had made a mistake. Sailing west, they had chased the sun, and every one of their days had been a little longer than a day at home. All the way around the world, those extra minutes add up to exactly one day.
Try it yourself ↓
your turn
Hold the left side of the screen to sail west, the right side to sail east. Your ship counts days by its own sunrises.
·
So the world needs a seam: a place where travellers change the date, adding a day going one way and skipping one going the other. That seam is the International Date Line. No treaty fixes it. It is a custom, and it wanders through the emptiest part of the Pacific.
Countries can even choose their side. In 1995 Kiribati moved the line so that the whole nation shares one date. At the end of 2011, Samoa jumped across it: Thursday 29 December was followed directly by Saturday 31 December.
right now, people on Earth are living in
2 different dates
Counting inhabited time zones, from UTC−11 to UTC+14. For about an hour each day there are three.
And far to the north, the seam runs through one narrow gap of water, between two islands, 3.8 km apart.
III.
Lines drawn on water
For thousands of years these islands had only their own names. In Iñupiaq the smaller is Iŋaliq and the larger Imaqłiq.
1728
Vitus Bering, sailing for Russia, sights them on 16 August (by the old calendar), the feast day of St. Diomede, and names them after the saint.
1867
Russia sells Alaska to the United States. The treaty draws the border midway between the two islands, and still calls them by older names: “Krusenstern, or Ignalook” and “Ratmanoff, or Noonarbook.”
Here, the International Date Line follows that border, so Russia keeps Asia's calendar and Alaska keeps America's.
So two islands, closer together than many people's commute, sit on opposite sides of the calendar.
Grab the red line and drag it. Where would you put it?
IV.
Drain the sea
keep scrolling: you are pulling the plug
The Bering Strait is shallow: mostly 30 to 50 metres deep. At its deepest, about the height of a 15-storey building.
Go back into the last ice age and the oceans fall. Ice sheets on the continents locked up so much water that the sea stood roughly 120–130 metres lower than today.
Until about 11,000 years ago, the strait was dry land: part of Beringia, a grassy plain up to about a thousand kilometres wide.
The Diomedes were just two hills. Woolly mammoths, horses, steppe bison and people lived here. There was no border and no date line, only land.
V.
The Ice Curtain
1942–1945
The two countries are allies. Nearly 8,000 American-built warplanes are flown across the strait to the Soviet Union.
Families on the two islands are tied together by kinship, marriage, trade and visits, as they had been for generations.
1948
The Soviet Union puts a border post on Big Diomede and moves its last 25–30 residents to the mainland. Ten years later that village is closed too, and the families scatter again.
On Little Diomede, people can still see their relatives' island from their windows. For about forty years, no one may cross.
They called it the Ice Curtain.
Lynne Cox · Bering Strait
- local date
- Fri 7 Aug 1987
- elapsed ≈
- 0 h 00 min
- water
- about 38–44 °F
- wetsuit
- none
VI.
Swimming into tomorrow
7 August 1987
The Cold War is still on. Lynne Cox, a long-distance swimmer from California, wades into the Bering Strait from Little Diomede.
No wetsuit: a swimsuit, a cap and goggles, in water a few degrees above freezing, for about 2.7 miles.
Somewhere in the middle she swims out of Friday and into Saturday.
About two hours after setting off, she comes ashore on Big Diomede, where Soviet officials greet her. That December, at a White House state dinner during the summit where the INF arms treaty was signed, Gorbachev praised her swim in a toast.
your turn
Tap the left half, then the right half, in a steady rhythm. Two taps on one side turn you. (Or ← →.)
VII.
The thaw
13 June 1988
An Alaska Airlines “Friendship Flight” takes off from Nome for Provideniya, in Soviet Chukotka. On board are officials, journalists, and nearly three dozen Alaska Natives.
The flight takes under an hour, and it lands in tomorrow. In Provideniya, some passengers meet relatives they have not seen in forty years.
September 1989
The two countries agree that Native people of the region may visit relatives across the strait without visas.
Lines on maps are drawn by people.
So are the ways across them.
VIII.
The frozen floor
In most winters the strait freezes. The water between today and tomorrow turns into a broken white floor of floes and pressure ridges.
In some winters a runway is plowed on the sea ice so that small planes can reach Little Diomede.
March 2006
Two adventurers, Karl Bushby and Dimitri Kieffer, walk across the frozen Bering Strait in about two weeks. When they reach Russia, they are detained for entering without permission.
And the ice now often forms later, melts earlier, and in some years is too thin for a runway at all.
your turn
A plane has landed on the ice runway. Tap where you want to hop, grab the mail and bring it home. Don't drift over the line.
IX.
Windows facing tomorrow
Diomede, or Inalik. Population 83 (2020 census). The only village on either island.
It is built on the island's west side. Every window looks out at tomorrow.
Big Diomede is still off-limits.
“It's always a reminder, each and every day.”
Robert Soolook of Little Diomede, to the Associated Press, 2015
touch the red dots to look closer
X.
Your longest birthday
Every date begins on Big Diomede almost a full day before it begins on Little Diomede. So in this one strait, a single date lasts 24 hours plus the gap between the islands' clocks.
When is your birthday?
tomorrow is waiting…
XI.
Send something to tomorrow
Nothing is stored on a server. If you send the boat to a friend, your words travel inside the link.
XII.
Wait for tomorrow
Little Diomede has been chasing Big Diomede's date all along. Help it catch up.
Right now on Big Diomede it is Saturday.
On Little Diomede it is still Friday.
Both are true. They are 3.8 kilometres apart.