Why would they do this? Since the Earth rotates around the sun year after year after year, our planet is slowing down.
Not a whole lot, mind you just one second every few years.
In fact, back in the days of the dinosaurs, days were only (23 hours long).
We have continuously gained an hour everyday over the coarse of millions of years.
That being said, sometimes the Earth’s speed rotation ups too! "This can be a result of earthquakes, tidal waves, underwater mountains, and general shifting of the Earth’s many natural structures".
Just as the Earth is always changing, so is the speed in which it spins around on its axis.
So to pamper for these ever so slight increases and decreases in rotation speed, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service adds a “leap second” whenever one is needed.
While it may appear like such a miniscule thing, it’s very necessary. Otherwise, our global daily routine would sooner or later get thrown out of wack as our days get longer or shorter but our clocks stay the same.
If it weren’t for these leap seconds, we could someday end up having our sunrises at 11pm and our sunsets at midday!
And while the act itself of applying one second to the clock might not seem like a big deal either, it can begin more ripples than you realize.
You see, computers by nature are very rational thinkers, and being forced to recognize two same seconds in a row doesn’t rest well with them.
As you can see in the photo above, the clock is reprogrammed just this once to count "as 23:59:58, 23:59:59, 23:59:60", then onto 00:00:00 as it ticks over midnight to next day.
The final “leap second” was applied in June of 2012, and websites like Reddit, Gawker, LinkedIn and Yelp. among many less notable ones, had a momentary freak-out.
This is because many websites to be down for over an hour, which isn’t exactly hard hitting news, is it?
But a big airline reservation system known as Amadeus Altea struggled also grasp this leap second, and this caused Qantas and Virgin Australia’s flight strategy to crumble.
Relax – no planes fell out of the sky, which is indeed what people were worried about in the lead-up to the new millennium (for those of you too young to remember, experts had warned that when the clock struck midnight on new Year’s Eve 1999, the entire world’s computer systems might shut down or “reboot” instead of ticking over from 1999 to 2000, which essentially would’ve sent us all back to the Stone Age in a mere millisecond).
It just caused posponedment on the ground, that’s all. Hopefully, this time around things should go a little smoother thanks to Google’s technique of breaking up the second into a handful of milliseconds and scattering them across a 24-hour period, so that the leap second isn’t even detectable but still occurs.
25 leap seconds have been added to the world clock since 1972. It’s amazing to think what some people manage to come up with behind the scenes for solutions to problems that most of us would never even think of or consider!
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