According to the Independent, the introduction of negative leap seconds might be necessary if the Earth's rotational speed keeps rising in order to maintain the accuracy of atomic clock measurements.
Digital Desk: On July 29, the Earth
beat its previous record for the shortest day as it spun around in 1.59
milliseconds less time than it normally does in a 24-hour period.
The
Independent claims that the globe has recently started speeding up. The
shortest month on record for the planet since the 1960s occurred in 2020. The
shortest day ever recorded was on July 19 of that year. It was shorter than a
usual 24-hour day by 1.47 milliseconds.
The
globe continued to spin faster overall the next year, but it didn't set any new
records. However, Interesting Engineering (IE) asserts that a 50-year era of
shorter days may already be beginning.
It
is still unclear what is causing the Earth's spin to vary in speed. However,
experts hypothesise that this might be caused by processes in the core's inner
or outer layers, oceans, tides, or even shifts in the climate.
The
"Chandler wobble," or the shifting of the Earth's geographic poles
across its surface, is another theory put out by certain experts as to why this
might be the case. Scientists Leonid Zotov, Christian Bizouard, and Nikolay
Sidorenkov explain this by comparing it to the quiver one notices when a
spinning top begins to pick up speed or slows down.
According
to the Independent, the introduction of negative leap seconds might be
necessary if the Earth's rotational speed keeps rising in order to maintain the
accuracy of atomic clock measurements.
The
negative leap second would, however, have potentially perplexing effects on
communications, computing, and smartphone systems. According to the
publication, who cited a Meta blog, the jump second "primarily benefits
scientists and astronomers" but is a "risky technique that does more
harm than good."
This
is due to the fact that the clock advances from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 before
ceasing to function at 00:00:00. Because of the timestamps on the data storage,
a time jump like this might destroy data and cause programs to crash.
The
clock will change from 23:59:58 to 00:00:00 if a negative leap second occurs,
according to Meta, and this could have a "devastating effect" on
software that uses timers and schedulers. International timekeepers might need
to add a "drop second"- a negative leap second- to resolve this,
claims IE.
Notably,
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the fundamental time reference used to govern
clocks and time throughout the world, has already undergone 27 leap second
updates.
