Climate change is delaying world clocks' need for a 'negative leap second'

We're nearing a year when a negative leap second could be needed to shave time — an unprecedented step that would have unpredictable effects, a new study says."One second doesn't sound like much, but in today's interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems," geophysicist Duncan Agnew says. Here, an official clock is seen at a golf tournament in Cape Town, South Africa.

"Even a few years ago, the expectation was that leap seconds would always be positive, and happen more and more often," Agnew said on the website of the They were created as a way to reconcile deviations between traditional astronomical time and the newer international reference based on atomic clocks, known as Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. It's a process that for years has been complicated by variations in the Earth's rotation.

Decades ago, scientists noticed the Earth was slowing down. But more recently, they've seen the planet's rotation speeding up. In the summer of 2022,Why do we leap day? We remind you

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