It’s Official: The Leap Second Will Be Retired (a Decade from Now)

Those extra seconds were tricky to insert in 1972; today, the technical issues are gnarly. For one, it’s hard to predict exactly when the next leap second will be needed, so computing networks cannot prepare for orderly, regular insertions. Different networks have developed their own, uncoordinated methods of incorporating the extra second.

Moreover, modern global computing systems have become more tightly intertwined and more reliant on hyper-precise timing, sometimes to the billionth of a second. Adding the extra second heightens the risk that those systems, which are responsible for telecommunication networks, energy transmission, financial transactions and other vital enterprises, will crash or fail to synchronize.

As a result, unofficial time systems have slowly begun to displace the world’s official international time, Coordinated Universal Time, or U.T.C. Eliminating the leap second is seen as a way of preserving adherence to U.T.C. by making it a continuous time scale rather than one that is episodically interrupted.

“The most important issue is the preservation of the concept that time is an international quantity,” said Judah Levine, a physicist at NIST. He called the Versailles decision “an incredible step forward.”

Russia voted against the resolution; Belarus abstained. Russia has long sought to delay abandonment of the leap second because its GLONASS global navigational satellite system incorporates the extra seconds, unlike other systems such as GPS, which is operated by the United States. With Russia’s concerns in mind, the leap second is not scheduled to be dropped until 2035, although it could happen sooner.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/19/science/time-leap-second-bipm.html