We hardly knew ‘ya. In fact, unless you are a website or a time nerd, you probably have never heard of it or cared. But, the people in charge of time (yes, there are people in charge of time) have for decades decided to add a so-called leap second to time to account for the vagaries of the earth’s movement around the sun.
The people in charge of time, known as the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM because French like FIFA), earlier had decided that they would scrap the leap second by 2035, but in a meeting yesterday decided not to wait that long and go ahead and scrap it next year in celebration of National Meteorology Day (May 20).
Let’s take a little bit of a step back. The BIPM’s job is to make sure that UTC, which for all intents and purposes is the official time for humans on this planet, aligns with what is known as UT1, which is the actual position of the earth. Because time moves forward at a regular place, and the earth tries to keep up but physical space is very hard, every once in a while the BIPM adds a leap second to keep them in line. For decades they have basically decided that the two should be aligned within one second of each other, but that has now changed. Instead, they will see to it that they are within an hour of each other, and will add or subtract an hour if they ever get that far out of line.
Part of the reasoning is because these little leap seconds cause problems. Sure, in an earlier era nobody would care what the UTC said, because everybody had shitty Casio watches and called the operator when they needed to reset the clocks after a power outage. But nowadays, the world relies on UTC: websites run on it, your computer and phone automatically syncs with it, hell at this point your oven probably does as well. Not too long ago (2012 wasn’t that long ago—right?), a bunch of websites went kaput when they added a second.
That glitch has largely been fixed, except for the other problem: the earth maybe has sped up a little:
In the mid-2010s, however, Earth’s spin began speeding up. Scientists predicted that a negative leap second would be necessary soon, perhaps as early as 2029. Engineers say a negative leap second would be like a “mini Y2K” event because it would suddenly send the entire world one second backward in time, which could cause chaos in our digital infrastructure.
So, the BIPM is moving from a leap second to a leap hour. I mean, we all hate changing our clocks, but don’t worry too much, because that isn’t expected to be needed for at least 1,000 years, at which point I would be surprised if we or the BIPM members were even still alive.
