Bad News: 2016 will be one second longer due to ‘Leap Second’

As 2016 has given the world an unprecedentedly contentious US Presidential election, claimed the lives of countless beloved public figures, and has generally cultivated turmoil throughout the world, most people tend to agree that they simply cannot wait for the year to be over.

Unfortunately, as IANS and the Economic Times are reporting, that will take a little longer than usual this year, as a “leap second” will be added to the world’s clocks when they hit 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) on December 31, 2016.

This will correspond to 6:59:59 pm Eastern Standard Time, at which point the extra second will be inserted at the US Naval Observatory’s Master Clock Facility in Washington, DC, scientists at the observatory explained in a statement originally released over the summer. The end result will be that those highly anticipating the end of 2016 will have to wait just a little bit longer.

What’s the reason for the leap second? According to the Washington Post, the Earth slows down because of ocean waves, slowing down at a rate of 2 milliseconds per day per century. Adding an extra second allows atomic clocks to again match up with the speed of the planet’s rotation.

This will be the 27th leap second added to the atomic clock

As the Naval Observatory explained, historically speaking, time was based on the mean rotation of the Earth relative to other celestial bodies. This reference frame was used to define the second, but the advent of atomic clocks resulted in another, more precise timescale that is independent of the planet’s rotation.

However, measurements indicate that the Earth’s rotation runs slightly slower than atomic time, and scientists have determined that this difference would reach one second after a span of about 500 to 750 days. Thus, an organization known as the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) was formed to make adjustments to keep atomic clocks and UTC times to within 0.9 seconds of each other by adding leap seconds as needed.

“In order to create UTC, a secondary timescale, International Atomic Time (TAI), is first generated; it consists of UTC without leap seconds,” the Naval Observatory explained. “When the system was instituted in 1972, the difference between TAI and UTC was determined to be 10 seconds.  Since 1972, 26 additional leap seconds have been added at intervals varying from six months to seven years, with the most recent being inserted on June 30, 2015. “

“After the insertion of the leap second in December, the cumulative difference between UTC and TAI will be 37 seconds,” they continued, noting that the leap seconds are actually “indications of the accumulated difference in time between the two systems… We can easily change the time of an atomic clock,” the Observatory concluded, “but it is not possible to alter the Earth’s rotational speed to match the atomic clocks.”

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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