It's a lovely idea: a little village somewhere on the edge of the world where people wake up each morning knowing they're the very first to see the new day. Several places have claimed the title over the years. But is there really one spot that always sees sunrise first?
Not quite. No village sees every sunrise before everyone else. The place best known for the honor is Caroline Island in the Pacific nation of Kiribati, which is the first place on Earth to see sunrise during much of the year. But it's an uninhabited coral atoll, not a village, and at certain times of year other spots beat it.
How a Line on a Map Moved an Island
Caroline Island owes its fame to a decision about the International Date Line. Kiribati is spread across a huge stretch of the Pacific, and for years the date line ran right through it, so parts of the country were a full day apart.
On December 31, 1994, Kiribati changed the time zone for its eastern Line Islands, placing the whole country on the western side of the date line. Caroline Island sits at a longitude that would normally put it 10 hours behind Greenwich time. Instead, it jumped to 14 hours ahead, the earliest time zone on Earth.
The Race to the Year 2000
The timing was no accident. With the year 2000 approaching, the first sunrise of the new millennium had real tourism value. In 1997, Kiribati renamed Caroline Island "Millennium Island." As the first point of land to reach January 1, 2000, it saw sunrise that morning at 5:43 a.m. local time.
Not everyone was happy. Tonga, New Zealand, and Fiji protested, saying the move cut into their own claims to the first dawn of 2000. In December 1999, more than 70 Kiribati singers and dancers traveled to the island along with about 25 journalists to celebrate.
The Surprise Winner: Antarctica
Here's the twist. According to the United States Naval Observatory, the very first point of land to see sunrise on January 1, 2000, by local time, wasn't a tropical island at all. It was a spot in East Antarctica, between the Dibble Glacier and Victor Bay, where the sun rose at 12:08 a.m.
That shows why no single place can claim every first sunrise. The sun's path shifts through the seasons, so which spot sees dawn first changes during the year. Near the poles, the sun can rise at very odd hours or not set at all.
A Pristine Little Paradise
Even without year-round bragging rights, Caroline Island is a special place. It's considered one of the most pristine tropical islands in the world, despite past guano mining, coconut harvesting, and short periods of settlement. It's home to one of the world's largest populations of coconut crabs and is an important nesting site for seabirds, especially sooty terns.
Nearby Kiritimati, also in Kiribati, shares the same earliest time zone and is one of the first inhabited places on Earth to ring in New Year's Day. So if you dream of greeting the new year before nearly everyone else, that's the place with people to celebrate alongside you.
Wherever you are, of course, your own sunrise is still worth getting up for, whether it arrives first or fashionably late.
