If today feels longer than your normal Tuesday, you’re not imagining it.
Scientists are adding an extra second to our clocks on Tuesday, June 30. The one extra second is called a ‘leap second,’ and it’s added every few years to keep up with the Earth’s rotation to account for a discrepancy between Earth’s rotation and the atomic clock.
The Earth is actually slowing down, scientists say.
“Earth’s rotation is gradually slowing down a bit, so leap seconds are a way to account for that,” Daniel MacMillan of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center said in a statement.
The extra second will be added as the clock strikes midnight universal time, meaning the leap second will come for those of us in the U.S. at 8 p.m. EDT, according to ABC News.
When the time comes, clocks synchronized to standard civil time will show the extra second as :60, however it’s possible that programs not equipped to handle the extra second could have an issue.
Leap seconds can be added in June or December, according to the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems. There have been 25 ‘leap seconds’ added since 1972.
When the last leap second was added on June 30, 2012, it caused issues with a number of websites, including Qantas, LinkedIn and Yelp, according to reports at the time.
