NEW YORK: At 2359 Greenwich Mean Time today (9:59am AEST Wednesday), when the world will experience a minute that will last 61 seconds.
The reason for the weird event is something called the leap second.
That’s when timekeepers adjust high-precision clocks so that they are in sync with Earth’s rotation, which is affected by the gravitational tug of the Sun and the Moon.
Few of the planet’s 7.25 billion people are likely to be aware of the change and even fewer will have set plans for how they will spend the extra moment.
But for horologists, or timekeepers, the additional second is a big deal and there is a wrangle as to whether it is vital or should be scrapped.
Service of the Rotation of the Earth (SRE) director Daniel Gambis admits “there is a downside”, the poetically named branch of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), is in charge of saying when the second should be added.
The leap second is not something that needs to be added to that old clock on your mantlepiece, but instead its importance is for super-duper timepieces, especially those using the frequency of atoms as their tick-tock mechanism.
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