On this coming Sunday June 30, intrepid horologists from around the world will daringly attempt to hold back the relentless onslaught of time. Well, to be fair it won’t actually be that difficult. July 1st is scheduled to start an entire second later than it should, a feat of temporal distortion that will be accomplished by making the final minute of the month last 61 seconds. And should you feel put out by this, you can take it up with the Earth and its wobbly spin.
2012 features a leap second — that ever so important added slice of time that compensates for inconsistencies in the Earth’s rotation. It takes our planet just over 86,400 seconds to make its 360-degree rotation. But because the Earth is affected by the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon, along with the rolling of the tides, our planet’s rotation is slightly slowed down.
These rotational mis-steps cause the Earth to get out of synch with International Atomic Time (IAT), which uses the pulsation of atoms to measure time to an accuracy of several billionths of a second. In order to resynchronize solar time with IAT time, the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is adjusted every few years to give us the odd 86,401 second day.
via When does a minute last 61 seconds?.
