World’s timekeepers upend how they adjust time to avoid catastrophic ‘negative second’ - Nature
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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