DUBLIN: Due to the rotation of the Earth falling behind schedule, one positive “leap second” will be added to the clocks on June 30 of this year by a report released Monday through the International Earth Rotation and References Systems Service (IERS) at the Paris Observatory.
The letter, addressed to “authorities responsible for the measurement and distribution of time,” advises that the extra second will be introduced during the final minute of the final day of June, just after the 23:59:59 mark on June 30, according to Daniel Gambis, head of the Earth Orientation Center of the IERS.
“Earth is slowing down a little bit,” said Nick Stamatakos, the chief of Earth Orientation Parameters at the US Naval Observatory, according to The Daily Mail. “They add an extra second to something called UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) in order to make sure the rate of UTC is the same as atomic time. For that day [June 30] there’ll be 86,401 seconds, instead of 86,400 seconds. The length of the day for you and I and everyone on the Earth will have an extra second.”
International Business Times reports that the “leap second” system began in 1972 to account for the Earth regularly undergoing deceleration due to the braking action of the tides. “Leap seconds ensure that, on average, the Sun continues to be overhead on the Greenwich meridian at noon to within about one [second],” researchers once stated in the journal Metrologia.
The leap second system allows our clocks to remain in sync with the Earth’s true rotation on its axis. The IERS has already added 25 leap seconds to Coordinated Universal Time, with the most recent addition in June 2012.
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