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June 30 will be a 2d longer than any other day this class .
A " leap 2nd " needs to be tot in 2015 to make trusted the metre on nuclear clocks stays in sync with Earth ’s rotational clip , but some Internet companies are dreading the day .
Earth ’s rotation has been slow up down by about two thousandths of a second every day . Butatomic clocks , which are now accurate up to quadrillionths of a second , do n’t transfer yard . While this situation is n’t an contiguous problem , it would eventually get clocks to become so out of sync with Earth ’s rotary motion that they would read noon during the dead of night . [ The Mysterious Physics of 7 Everyday Things ]
" Earth is slowing down over geological time , and that can lead to a job when you ’ve got a ton of clocks , " Demetrios Matsakis , chief scientist for Time Service at the U.S. Naval Observatory , secern Live Science . " What do you do when the 24-hour interval gets longer ? "
The solution that the International Earth Rotation Service ( IERS ) came up with is to add up a sec every now and then to keep the standard nuclear time in sync with Earth ’s metre . This twelvemonth , the extra second is scheduled for the Battle of Midway point in the class , at 11:59.59 p.m. matching Universal Time ( UTC ) on June 30 .
This will be the twenty-sixth leaping second add to a calendar year since the practice began in 1972 . In the past tense , the additional second has messed with computing machine systems . Thelast leaping second was bestow in 2012 , and it induce problems for big company like Reddit , LinkedIn , Gizmodo and FourSquare .
The problem is that during the bound secondly , the figurer clock shows 60 seconds instead of simply rolling over to the next moment , or shows the 59th second double . The computer sees a leap second astime go backward , Matsakis say . The simple machine registers this as a system of rules error , and the CPU can overload .
Google , to skirt the problem , will total a millisecond to its waiter every once in a while throughout the twelvemonth . This way , the slowed - down servers do n’t notice when anextra secondis slue in . Another good way to avoid any difficulty is to simply shut down a computer organization for an hour or two around the leap secondly , Matsakis tell .
But many programmers are oblivious to leap seconds , and this can also cause problem . The extra seconds happen so infrequently and so irregularly that it makes it hard for computer caller to catch on to the problem . While Reddit , LinkedIn , Gizmodo and FourSquare will likely remember the example they get word three class ago , other sites that did n’t get any emergence are probable still " blissfully incognizant , " Matsakis allege .
But the saltation second could put more than just estimator systems at hazard . It ’s a lilliputian over - cautious , Matsakis admits , but he said he would not need to be on board a plane during a leap secondly . The extra second has been known to interrupt GPS receivers , which could be a problem for pilots .
The saltation bit is a more subtle correction than a leap year . Theleap year rule(adding an extra Clarence Day every four eld in February ) keeps the Gregorian calendar fairly close to the actual astronomic record of the passing of time . It does so by correcting for the 365.2422 days it takes for the Earth to journey around the sun , compared with 365 days , as humans have round this number to .
But Earth ’s gyration is n’t staring , and there are abnormality from year to year on the millisecond tier . Every few years some finely - tuning is needed , and a leap second is added in June or December . This is why June 30 this year will have 86,401 second alternatively of 86,400 .
