For many people around the world, Tyumen is associated with oil and gas. If a person is not a geography expert or an oil and gas specialist, the answers to a specific question about the location of this place will vary. They will remember Siberia, the North, and the Urals, and honestly answer that they do not know. And only a few, besides the locals, will wonder what time zone is in Tyumen.
Bit of history
In fact, from a geographical point of view, Tyumen is not the Urals, although it is part of the Urals Federal District, but real Siberia, albeit Western. The city itself with a population of more than six hundred thousand is the center of the region of the same name, which also includes the territories of the Khanty-Mansiysk and Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Districts. Therefore, the entire vast territory of almost one and a half million square kilometers, which is much larger than any European country, is called the Tyumen region.
The city of Tyumen was founded during the first conquest of Siberia in 1586 and is, in fact, the first Siberian city. It gained its great importance in the Russian Federation after finding hydrocarbon deposits in this region, for which it received the unofficial status of the oil and gas capital of Russia.
Difference with Moscow
The distance between the oil and gas and the administrative capital of Russia is 1725 kilometers. Despite such a great distance and belonging to the Siberian region, Tyumen is not much north of Moscow, the difference is less than two degrees of latitude, that is, less than two hundred kilometers. But the time zone of Tyumen differs from Moscow by two hours. If cities were closer to the equator, this difference would be only one division. But since the action takes place above the 55th parallel of the northern latitude, the size of one degree has a significantly smaller mileage.
A bit about the history of time zones
Ever since the adoption of the postulate about the sphericity of the Earth and its rotation around the Sun, it was clear that the illumination of the planet by the luminary occurs unevenly and simultaneously. But the problem of time synchronization did not consist. In each city, time tracking was different. The question, what time zone of Tyumen or London, has not yet been raised. When the sun was at its highest point - it was noon. From this came the report. Nearby cities usually chose the same time, but sometimes this could lead to incidents, and time differences could reach a quarter of an hour.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, due to the wide development of railway communication, time differences in different cities began to bring enormous inconvenience. For the first time, the issue of time synchronization was dealt with in England, the leader of the world industrialization of that time. Since 1840, all the railway stations in England were oriented on time in London, but the whole country switched to a single time only forty years after the adoption of the relevant law.
By 1884, the division of the planet into twenty-four time zones began to be discussed all over the world, and it was precisely to this year that the signing of an international agreement was timed. Representatives from twenty-six countries agreed to a single system of time zones and standard time. However, representatives of the Russian Federation refused to sign this agreement, so the time zone of Tyumen differed from the global one for another 35 years, until Soviet Russia entered the unified world time system.
Summer time
The British were also innovators in another matter concerning time. At the beginning of the twentieth century, electricity was quite expensive, and a London entrepreneur in a newspaper article suggested saving on lighting costs. It was necessary to set the time twenty minutes ahead starting in the month of April, to return the clock hands at the end of September. This idea of saving energy costs was realized in England during the First World War, only taking into account the unified world time system , the transfer was carried out for one hour.
After the war, many countries of the world switched to a system of economy. However, in the modern world there are many opponents of the transition to daylight saving time. They note that electricity has fallen in price over a century, and the main value is people themselves. For ordinary people, a change of time adversely affects the body. Many countries of the world rejected the idea of switching to summer time, including Russia in 2011, fixing the time difference between Moscow and London at three o’clock. Based on this, the time zone of Tyumen differs from zero London by five hours.
Between Tyumen and Moscow
In addition to dividing the surface of the globe into twenty-four time zones, it was decided that the change of zones does not take place exactly along the meridians, but takes into account state (if the whole country is in the same time zone) and administrative-territorial borders (if there are several).
The territory of Russia, in addition to being the largest in area, is also the longest from west to east. Therefore, it includes as many as eleven time zones. If you take Tyumen, its time zone relative to Moscow will be +2 hours. That is, the time throughout the Tyumen region will differ from Moscow by two hours in a big way. But on the territory of the Tyumen region itself, the dawn time of the sun due to huge spaces can be more than an hour. The distance between cities (adjusted to the
time zone) Tyumen-Moscow can quickly overcome: fly out of Western Siberia at dawn and meet the same dawn in the capital of Russia.