online.gif Click here to get 50% off your next American Airlines flight.
info-l.gif info-r.gif
view


Millennium Milieu

Where will day first break in the new millennium?

Somewhere in the vast reaches of the South Pacific Ocean in the predawn stillness of the morning of January 1, 2001, a relative handful of people—locals and tourists—will stand silhouetted along a shoreline and watch the sun wink over the horizon. They will thus be the first souls to greet the sunrise in the new millennium.

All locations in that first time zone just to the west of the International Date Line will officially greet the new year at midnight as far as the clock goes. But where will dawn first break?

Because of the curvature of the earth, the sun casts its rays on higher latitudes (those closer to the poles) earlier than it does on those nearer the equator. According to astronomers at Britain’s Royal Greenwich Observatory, the first place to greet the sun each year is probably the Balleny Islands, off the coast of Antarctica. But no one lives there. Finding the appropriate inhabited island is a bit more problematic, particularly since nations are free to set their time zones somewhat arbitrarily.

Apparently that’s what the island nation of Kiribati, just south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean, has done. Its far flung specks of coral had sat squarely on the International Date Line rendering part of the country a day behind the other. To correct this, Kiribati decreed that as of January 1, 1995, the Date Line would zig-zag eastward to include all its islands. By curious happenstance, this means that tiny Caroline Island, the easternmost in Kiribati, is technically the first inhabited place to see the sun each morning. Providing no other nations redraw the Date Line, Caroline Island might just be the place to be for the party of millennium.

Do you have any information on the beautiful refugee girl with arresting eyes who graced your cover some years ago?

Unfortunately, we do not know what became of the Afghan girl who appeared on the cover of the June 1985 issue of NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and in other Society publications. The photographer, Steve McCurry, remembers photographing her in Nasir Bagh, a refugee camp in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. But we don’t know her name or where she can be found.

Photographers in the field shoot hundreds—even thousands—of pictures and are constantly on the move. In situations such as this, it is difficult or impossible for them to get detailed information about individuals photographed.

Rarely has a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC photograph stirred so much interest. It has been such a popular image, in fact, that we have produced a 24” x 32” poster. Orders can be placed in the U.S. and Canada, by calling 1-800-NGS-LINE (1-800-647-5463). The cost is $15.95 and the product number is 81222.

How did our planet get its name?

It won a lottery! No, just kidding. It came in third. Ha! Kidding again! It turns out that those of us who speak English call our fair planet the same thing our forebears called the ground they walked around on. The word “earth” comes from the middle English word “erthe,” which in turn descends from the Old English “eor.” These words are related to the Old High German word “erda“ and the Greek word "era."

All of these words once simply referred to the stuff underfoot. Long before anyone realized that the earth was itself a planet and not simply the flat center of the universe, folks needed terms for the local rocks and soil. Once the planet concept took hold, the appellation for the home realm carried over and became the planet’s name.

Even today, because of the word’s humble origin, we often spell “earth” with a lowercase e. But the lifeless planets, named for gods, get capital letters. Go figure.