International timekeepers vote to abolish the leap second from our clocks. What does it mean? - CP24

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WorldFor more than 50 years, humanity has used "leap seconds" to keep our clocks aligned with the rotation of the Earth. On Thursday, an international time-keeping body in France voted to do away with leap seconds and let the clocks slip until they're out of alignment by a full hour — meaning it could be centuries, or even millennia, before another tweak is needed. International time-keeping body votes to ditch the decades-long tradition ThursdayKevin Maimann · CBC News · Posted: Oct 15, 2026 4:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: October 15Listen to this articleEstimated 5 minutesThe audio version of this article is generated by AI-based technology. Mispronunciations can occur. We are working with our partners to continually review and improve the results. Clockmaker Scott Gow adjusts the hands of a clock at the Electric Time Company in Medfield, Mass., in 2024. An international body voted to do away with leap seconds and let the clocks slip until they're out of alignment by a full hour. (Charles Krupa/The Associated Press)For more than 50 years, humanity has used "leap seconds" to keep our clocks aligned with the rotation of the Earth.

Human timekeeping rests on two main clocks, and they don’t always run at the same speed. For decades, the solution was the leap second, a minor adjustment added to international time to keep atomic accuracy aligned with the Earth’s natural motion. But on Thursday, the General Conference on Weights and Measures, or the CGPM (abbreviated from its French name), voted to abolish the leap second, closing a long-standing chapter in global time sync. Most modern clocks rely on Coordinated Universal Time, a hybrid system caught between atomic time, which flows at a near-perfectly constant rate, and astronomical time, which fluctuates as the Earth’s rotation speeds up and slows down. To bridge the gap, UTC periodically inserted a leap second to keep pace with the planet. But reconciling physical planetary shifts with precise digital systems ultimately created more technical disruptions than it solved.

Governments have voted to abolish the leap second immediately and replace it with a leap hour. Metrologists retire the leap second immediately, instead of by 2035. Credit: Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press via GettyTime discrepancies that used to be adjusted by a jump of a second around once every 1.5 years will now wait until an hour needs correcting instead. Leap seconds serve to align time given by the sun’s position in the sky, which is based on Earth’s unsteady natural rotation, with the more stable ticking of atomic clocks, known as Universal Coordinated Time (UTC). But the rogue seconds have been a thorn in timekeepers' sides, disrupting computing systems and causing misalignment between clocks on the day they are implemented. Their replacement — a shift of an hour once Earth time and atomic time drift apart by 3,600 seconds — likely won’t be needed for thousands of years, effectively pushing the issue onto future generations. The leap second is dead. Long live the leap hour? Member states of the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) voted to pass the resolution at their 28th meeting, outside Paris, on 15 October.

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