Skip the leap seconds
Weltzeituhr, Alexanderplatz, Berlin. © iStock.
Leap seconds are what we add to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to sync it with the inconsistent speed in the Earth’s rotation. Starting in 1972, twenty-seven leap seconds have been applied, since you asked. During the 27th Annual Meeting of Weights and Measures on November 18 in Versailles (France), a nearly unanimous vote, with Russia voting against and one abstention by Byelorussia, decided to suspend leap seconds starting in 2035. UTC will tick away just fine without them until 2135.
The reasoning behind this decision is that over the next hundred years, metrologists – researchers who specialize in time – will figure out the best way to align the atomic and astronomical time scales. System administrators all over the world, and especially those for large companies, as well as those who manage global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), get a hundred-year break. In 2012 and 2017, the insertion of leap seconds caused hours of outages in companies such as Reddit, Qantas and Cloudflare.
Besides, recent observations of the Earth’s rotational speed lead researchers to think that we might need to insert a negative leap second (take out a second) – which has never been done before and might bring about its own special havoc.
⇨ Ars Technica, Kevin Purdy, “Network-crashing leap seconds to be abandoned by 2035, for at least a century.”
2022-11-22
