Time lords prepare to kick leap seconds into the next millennium
Risk of an unprecedented negative adjustment prompts plan to let UTC drift by as much as an hour
The prospect of a negative leap second – combined with decades of irritation over leap seconds generally – looks set to inspire a bit of global procrastination among international timekeepers.
Next month, the General Conference on Weights and Measures is set to vote on effectively calling time on leap seconds. A draft resolution [PDF] would make Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) continuous from May 20, 2027, and allow the difference between UTC and UT1, a measure of time based on Earth's rotation, to reach as much as one hour.
Leap seconds keep UTC, which is based on atomic clocks, within 0.9 seconds of time determined by the slightly wobbly rotation of our home planet. Since the system was introduced in 1972, 27 leap seconds have been added to UTC.
The urgency comes partly...
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