Plan B Forum

PARIS - Scientists say Saturday will stretch a second longer.

Universal time will read the unusual 11:59:60 before it hits midnight.

International timekeepers periodically add a “leap second” to make up for a gradual slowdown in the Earth’s rotation.

Experts at the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service make the adjustment when the planet’s movement falls out of sync with atomic clocks used to measure time.

The time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis — the definition of a day — is now about two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, said Geoff Chester, spokesperson at the U.S. Naval Observatory. It adds up to nearly three-quarters of a second a year.

This is the first leap second since January 2009 and the 25th overall since the process started in 1972. Scientists said the next one probably won’t be needed until 2015 or 2016.

Roberto Abraham, who teaches astronomy at the University of Toronto, said without the leap seconds, things would eventually be “out of sync.”

“So after 500 years, you would find the clock says it’s noon, but the sun is two hours away from its maximum height, he said.

Abraham said theoretically, he wouldn’t hold it against anyone if their response was “Who cares?” But on the other hand, society would be affected when it comes to farming, religious festivals and cultural practices.

“I do agree that, at some level, you don’t want to just toss out thousands of years of history just because some guy invents a better widget for measuring time,” said Abraham.

Scientists said there should be no noticeable affect or inconvenience on computers or any other technology that requires precise timekeeping because they adjust for these leap seconds.

Earlier this year, official timekeepers from across the world discussed whether to eliminate the practice of adding leap seconds. They decided they needed more time to think and will next debate the issue in 2015.

The time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis — the definition of a day — is now about two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago,

The time it takes the Earth to rotate on its axis — the definition of a day — is now about two milliseconds longer than it was 100 years ago, said Geoff Chester, spokesperson at the U.S. Naval Observatory. It adds up to nearly three-quarters of a second a year.

“So after 500 years, you would find the clock says it’s noon, but the sun is two hours away from its maximum height, he said.

After an extra second was added to the clock at the weekend to better align it with the Earth’s rotation schedule, a whole slew of websites from LinkedIn, Foursquare and Reddit to Mozilla, Yelp and Gawker sites experienced technical issues.

Known as a “leap second”, which is a basic one-second adjustment applied to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to keep it up-to-date with solar time, the additional second added didn’t sit well with various web servers.
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For example, Reddit said it was having Java and Cassandra issues and Gawker’s entire site network was down for about 45 minutes. Other sites such as Yelp and Stumbleupon also reported technical trouble.

We are having some Java/Cassandra issues related to the leap second at 5pm PST. We're working as quickly as we can to restore service.
— reddit status (@redditstatus) July 1, 2012

Before the weekend, the last time the clock added a second was in 2008. It’s not unusual for sites to undergo difficulties processing the extra time, but overall, the process has always been a worldwide success.

The news comes just one day after a power outage from a storm in Virginia caused Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which powers sites such as Netflix, Pinterest and Instgram, to temporarily shut down.

Before the weekend, the last time the clock added a second was in 2008. It’s not unusual for sites to undergo difficulties processing the extra time, but overall, the process has always been a worldwide success.