Parliamentarians in Spain have said it's time that the country slowed down to GMT, the time zone it should, geographically at least, be in. Which other countries are racing ahead and which are running behind schedule?

It's about time! A team of Spanish parliamentarians have recommended that the country take a step back, reclaim its lost hour, and live out its future on Greenwich Mean Time alongside the likes of Britain, Morocco and Mali. The review, written by the National Commission for the Rationalisation of Working Hours is expected to get backing by MPs on Thursday. But what about the rest of the world? We look at which countries clocks are caught in the wrong time zone and why.

Märket

Sometimes, time zones split up countries - and sometimes they can split up tiny, uninhabited 0.03 km2 islands. That's just what happened to Märket which is served up in two thinly sliced pieces - one Finnish, the other Swedish.

Image: Oona Räisänen

The only problem was that the Finns had already finished building their lighthouse by the time they realised it was on the Swedish side of the island. The result: a time line that looks like the path of a hypochondriac around a pharmacy.

Going too farsi?

Iran is one of a handful of countries whose difference from Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) doesn't come in full hour units. So Iranian time is 3 hours and 30 minutes ahead of UK time, which sort of makes sense as the country sits almost precisely between the +3 hour and +4 hour time zones. But as a result, no other country in the world shares Iranian time.

Can we have Samoa time please

Spain could take a leaf out of Samoa's book - the latest country to (sort of) time travel. In 2011, the country changed not only its time zone, but even its date, with relatively little disruption to the country's 186,000 residents. In 1892, American traders had persuaded local Samoans to align island time with nearby US-controlled American Samoa to make trading easier. 119 years later, the country decided to jump when midnight came on Thursday 29 December to Saturday 31 December. Making the shift along with the island of Tokelau, the decision effectively straightened out a bizarre kink in the world's time lines.

Argentina step forward then back then forward forward back

Argentina's position on the earth's surface means that technically, its clocks should be set to four hours behind GMT. But it's spent many years deciding where exactly it should put itself - from 1920 to 1969 it flip-flopped between GMT-4 and GMT-3 before it spent most of the next two decades changing between GMT-3 and GMT-2. Since 1993 though, the country has shared a time zone with Uruguay and Suriname that is three hours behind GMT.

Antartica pie

In theory, Antarctica should have 24 time zones because it sits on every line of longitude. In practice, it has around 10, based largely on different countries' claims to portions of the territory.