New Year's Eve, Twelve Time Zones at Once

The new year does not arrive everywhere at once. It reaches Auckland roughly twenty-one hours before it reaches Honolulu, and in between it sweeps through every time zone on Earth in order, one midnight at a time. TubeTraveler's New Year Countdown, City by City collection lines up landmark cams in exactly that order, so the sequence of the page mirrors the sequence of the actual event.

Unlike most of the site's lists, this collection is deliberately not alphabetical. The cams are sorted by UTC offset, starting with the time zones furthest ahead — New Zealand and Japan and Korea — and working backward around the globe through Europe and finally the Americas. That means you can start the evening on whichever cam is about to hit midnight in its own local time, watch it happen, and then jump to the next one in line rather than the next one alphabetically.

Landmark cams tend to be the most dramatic choice for this exact moment, because so many of them are built around fireworks, illumination, or a crowd — Tokyo's Rainbow Bridge, Busan's Gwangan Bridge, Seoul's Lotte World Tower, and Amsterdam's Dam Square all draw real New Year's crowds and lighting displays. Quieter entries in the same collection, like the small-town squares of Jičín in the Czech Republic or Eger in Hungary, show the same event at a much smaller, more local scale — no fireworks show, just a town square passing midnight the way it always does.

You don't need to wait for December 31st for any of this to work — the collection is sorted by time zone year-round, so it doubles as a simple way to see which part of the world is currently furthest into its day.