"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.In these challenging times, the need for reliable local reporting has never been greater. Put a value on the impact of our year-round coverage.
In our technologically interconnected era, many devices and systems rely on sharing a certain awareness of precisely what time it is. While leap seconds have largely been absorbed into current mechanisms, experts say, a negative leap second — or, a minute with only 59 seconds — could pose an entirely new challenge.
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."By the 1960s, Earth was and had been decelerating, and so rotating more slowly than in the nineteenth century, which defined the atomic second," Agnew writes.
The net result for timekeepers, the new research says, is that climate change seems to have delayed the potential need for a negative leap second, at least for a bit.
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