Don't blink or you might miss the leap second on this afternoon. At 2 p.m. today, June 30 in Hawaii, an extra second will be added to the clock to compensate for the slowing of the Earth’s rotation, reports AP. It is called leap second, and it is happened 25 times since 1972, says ABC News online.
“While a leap second is hardly enough time to change daily life, it has been known to affect some computer systems in the past,” says AP. “There have been calls to abandon the practice of periodically adding an extra second, which has kept computers synchronized with the Earth day since 1972. The last time was in 2012.”
A United Nations committee that deals with communications is expected to make a decision about whether or not to keep updating clocks with the leap second, but the decision isn’t expected to be announced until later this year at the earliest, reports AP.
“For now, Tuesday's leap second means clocks will move from 23:59:59 to the odd reading of 23:59:60 before it hits midnight, universal time,” AP says. That's 8 p.m. in the Eastern United States and the afternoon in Hawaii.
"It's just a small correction between the rotation of the earth which is changing and the atomic clocks, which are nearly perfect," said Professor Dan Snowden-Ifft of Occidental College in Los Angeles, Calif., according to ABC News. “But what isn't nearly perfect is how computers deal with the added second. Last leap second in 2012, Internet companies like Reddit, Yelp, and LinkedIn got knocked offline. Even Australian airline Qantas saw their computers go down,” reports ABC News.
But Professor Snowden-Ifft says no one should leap to any bad conclusions. "I don't see anything catastrophic happening here," Snowden-Ifft said in the ABC News story.