“One second doesn’t sound like much, but in today’s interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems,” geophysicist Duncan Agnew says. Here, an official clock is seen at a golf match in Cape Town, South Africa.

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“One second doesn’t sound like much, but in today’s interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems,” geophysicist Duncan Agnew says. Here, an official clock is seen at a golf match in Cape Town, South Africa.

Johan Rynners/Getty Images

Climate change has been blamed for a lot of dramatic results on our planet and our lives. Now it could even have an effect on the measurement of time.

You’ve most likely heard of “leap seconds” — the sliver of time scientists sometimes add to the world’s official time normal to resolve a divergence between old style time-telling and trendy atomic clocks.

But we’re nearing a 12 months when a unfavorable leap second might be wanted to shave time — an unprecedented step that can rely partly on how local weather change impacts the Earth’s rotation, in line with a brand new research.

Here’s an summary of the bizarre scenario, which is laid out by geophysicist Duncan Agnew, in a research printed Wednesday in Nature.

Why is one second such a giant deal?

In our technologically interconnected period, many gadgets and programs depend on sharing a sure consciousness of exactly what time it’s. While leap seconds have largely been absorbed into present mechanisms, specialists say, a unfavorable leap second — or, a minute with solely 59 seconds — may pose a completely new problem.

“Even a few years ago, the expectation was that leap seconds would always be positive, and happen more and more often,” Agnew mentioned on the web site of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

But due to new dynamics affecting how briskly the Earth rotates, he added, a unfavorable leap second now appears simply years away.

“One second doesn’t sound like much, but in today’s interconnected world, getting the time wrong could lead to huge problems,” he mentioned.

Leap seconds have had critics for a protracted minute, partly due to the havoc they’ll wreak on issues like on-line reservation and retail programs. A pair years in the past, engineers at Meta railed against it, stating, “Introducing new leap seconds is a risky practice that does more harm than good” and must be changed.

Worth noting: “In 2012, a leap second caused a major Facebook outage, as Facebook’s Linux servers became overloaded trying to work out why they had been transported one second into the past,” the Data Center Dynamics web site famous.

Why do we have now leap seconds?

They have been created as a technique to reconcile deviations between conventional astronomical time and the newer worldwide reference based mostly on atomic clocks, referred to as Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. It’s a course of that for years has been sophisticated by variations within the Earth’s rotation.

“By the 1960s, Earth was and had been decelerating, and so rotating more slowly than in the nineteenth century, which defined the atomic second,” Agnew writes.

The first leap second was added in 1972. In the primary many years, it turned practically an annual course of. In the previous 23 years, scientists have added solely 4 leap seconds, in line with Agnew.

“Since 1972, irregularities in Earth’s movement have called for 27 leap seconds to be added — at irregular intervals and with a maximum of only 6 months’ notice each time,” mentioned Patrizia Tavella, director of the Time Department on the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in France, in a discussion printed in Nature together with Agnew’s analysis.

The present drawback, Agnew says, is that Earth’s rotation now appears to be regularly getting quicker than the established time normal can account for.

How is local weather change concerned?

First issues first: Earth’s rotation is not neat like a well-spun high. There’s a definite wobble — and it may be affected by numerous elements, from powerful earthquakes to what is going on on in the planet’s core to how water is distributed.

The dynamics are advanced; there’s even a gravitational discipline produced by huge ice sheets and glaciers to keep in mind.

Decades in the past, scientists seen the Earth was slowing down. But extra lately, they’ve seen the planet’s rotation dashing up. In the summer time of 2022, NPR even noted one of many shortest days ever recorded.

And this is the place issues get a bit bizarre. Human-induced local weather change truly acts to decelerate the planet’s rotation, Agnew says, as a result of when ice melts on the poles, the planet will get a bit extra rectangular — wider on the equators — and fewer spherical. That means Earth spins a little bit slower, like when an ice skater holds their arms out, reasonably than pulling them in.

The internet outcome for timekeepers, the brand new analysis says, is that local weather change appears to have delayed the potential want for a unfavorable leap second, at the least for a bit.

“According to Agnew’s calculations, changes in polar ice mass have delayed this eventuality by another three years, to 2029,” writes Harvard University geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica in Nature’s dialogue of the brand new research.

Are we prepared for a unfavorable leap second?

“A negative leap second has never been added or tested, so the problems it could create are without precedent,” Tavella wrote.

“Metrologists [not a typo: a metrologist studies and applies the science of measurement] around the world are following the unfolding discussion attentively, with the view to avoiding any unnecessary risks,” she mentioned.

Agnew notes that whereas leap seconds have been added with out incident, it stays to be seen how computer systems and networks will deal with subtracting time.

“Many systems now have software that can accept an additional second, but few if any allow for removing a second,” Agnew mentioned, “so that a negative leap second is expected to create many difficulties.”

Other options may current themselves. In 2022, the General Conference on Weights and Measures decided to eliminate the leap second by 2035. The group may resolve to remove the potential of a unfavorable leap second prior to that deadline.

Agnew suggests the teams that decide UTC ought to undertake a brand new rule: “never allow” a unfavorable leap second.