Scientists at the 28th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) in Versailles, France, have voted to abolish the leap second – replacing it with the leap hour.
The ruling, which took place on Thursday, October 15, only affects Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and will come into effect from May 2027.
Leap seconds were introduced in 1972 to keep UTC and Earth’s rotation aligned – since then, there have been 27 leap seconds.
Why was the leap second abolished?
CGPM cites the widespread adoption of digital technologies, which can struggle with the extra second, as the main reason for its abolition.
“After 30 years of debate, the leap second is making way for the leap hour,” said Dr Setnam Shemar, head of time at UK’s National Physical Laboratory.
“This will reduce the risks to the systems and national infrastructure that depend on accurate time while still preserving the fundamental link between our global time system and the rotation of the Earth,” Dr Shemar added.
Millenium bug
In 2022, the CGPM decided to phase out the leap second by 2035.
However, due to changes in the speed at which Earth spins, scientists in 2010 started worrying about the need for a reverse leap second.
If the leap second was hard enough for computers to handle, a negative second would likely be catastrophic, akin to a worst-case Y2K scenario.
When a normal leap second was added in 2012, sites across the web, from Reddit to LinkedIn, crashed, and airlines such as Qantas faced major delays.
With an estimated date of 2029 for a reverse leap second, the CGPM decided this year to accelerate the abolition of the system to avoid any more disruption.
It is not yet known when a leap hour would occur, if ever.
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Will Daylight Saving Time be abolished?
The abolition of the leap second is not the only change to time under consideration, with several governments considering removing the hour between Daylight Savings Time (DST) and their respective time zones.
Much of the world has already stopped the clock change, with some countries never having adopted it in the first place.
North America and Europe are the last major holdouts to change the clocks twice a year.
However, the Sunshine Protection Act is making its way through the US lawmaking system and aims to make DST permanent.
The EU has also signalled its wishes to abolish the system, although a dispute over whether to move to permanent winter or summer time has stalled progress.
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