The need for a ‘negative leap second’ after the rapid rotation of the Earth

Experts say the Earth may soon need a ‘negative leap second’ when clocks around the world have to subtract a second to keep time accurate.

This is because the Earth’s orbit is gradually speeding up, which means that our Earth does not take the full 24 hours according to our clocks to complete an orbit around the Sun.

However, according to new research, this increase in the speed of the earth has been slightly reduced due to the effect of global warming. Changes in ice caps mean that the need for a negative leap second may occur or be expected to occur every three years.

Most of today’s technologies, such as computers and financial markets, rely on time to be consistent and reliable, but the Earth’s rotation is not constant, which means that an occasional leap second must be added to correct time. Can be fixed.

However, this rotation is accelerating so that the world can run with the clocks. This has happened so many times that leap seconds are becoming rare.

But scientists say that one day soon the speed will be such that the world will actually need to slow down by a leap second. Time will be reduced instead of increased.

This would mean that on a selected day 23.59.59 would not be present on the clock and the clock would advance to the next day by 58 seconds.

Duncan Agnew, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego and the study’s lead author, said: ‘This is an unprecedented situation and a very big deal.’

According to him: ‘It is not a major change in the rotation of the earth that will cause any destruction or any damage but it is something remarkable. This is another indication that we are living in a very unusual time.’

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It is not clear that given our current computing infrastructure it would be possible to remove a leap second when time has been added multiple times in the past, such as 27 leap seconds since 1972. It is never minimized so software is not designed to minimize time.

Patrizia Tavila of the Time Department of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures wrote in the article: ‘A negative leap second has never been introduced or tested so there is no precedent for the problems it might cause.’

He suggested that experts should work to understand how likely it is that a negative leap second would be needed in order to assess the risks that doing so might pose.

Computers have had problems with leap seconds themselves before. When a leap second was introduced in 2012, problems were seen at several companies, including Reddit and Qantas Airlines.

Some experts argue that the leap second should not exist at all. Timekeepers are arranging to replace clocks so that they are no longer needed, and technology companies have begun to add fractions of seconds throughout the day to keep clocks accurate.

In the past there was no need for a leap second when time was synchronized with the motion of the Earth. But since the 1950s, time has been based on atomic clocks, which are more accurate and therefore affected by the less reliable rotation of the Earth.