It’s Official: Timekeepers Have Abandoned The Leap Second
Everyone knows that February gets an extra day every four years. It's called a leap year. What you might not have heard of, however, is the leap year’s sporadic little sibling: the leap second.
The leap second was top of the agenda at the recent General Conference on Weights and Measures in France, where Earth's timekeepers decided to return it to obscurity by getting rid of it altogether. Traditionally, one Earth orbit around the sun determines the length of a year, and one Earth rotation on its axis determines the length of a day. Because it takes Earth around 365.25 days to go around the sun, timekeepers add that extra leap day once every four years to make sure our seasonal calendar stays aligned with the orbit. That's the relatively simple bit.
Earth’s daily rotation, however, is not as regular, because the speed of the planet’s spin can change, ever so slightly. In fact, but about one second. Therein lies the problem. A second may not seem like much, but it’s caused a lot of commotion in the scientific community because the planet’s rotation has been speeding up ever so slightly over the past few years. Scientists predicted we would soon need to subtract a leap second and force clocks to go backward, something that’s never been done before and that could trigger serious software issues. Remember Y2K?
So to avoid a potential “mini Y2K,” timekeeping experts decided to replace the second with a full leap hour, to be implemented one day hundreds or thousands of years in the future, when tech will hopefully be better equipped for the task.
