Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone's control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year's Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you'll have an extra second to celebrate because a "Leap Second" will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.

By international agreement, the world's timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world's irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009.

The extra second, ordered by the world's nominal timekeeper, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, will be marked officially at the stroke of midnight on Wednesday in Greenwich, England, the home of what is popularly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to the more technically inclined – the standard time for the planet.

So at precisely 23:59:60 at Greenwich, England, on New Year's Eve, there will be a one-second void before the onset of midnight and the start of the New Year. Wednesday will see the 24th Leap Second that has been needed since the practice was initiated in 1972, and will be the first in three years.

The extra second is needed to keep the world's clocks in time with the rotation of the planet. Time measured by the rotation of the Earth is not uniform when compared to time kept by atomic clocks. Today's atomic clocks have an inaccuracy of less than one second in 200 million years.

But for various reasons – the sloshing molten core, the rolling of the oceans and the effects of solar and lunar gravity – our planet rotates on its axis at irregular rates, and on average has been falling behind atomic time at a rate of about two milliseconds per day. It now trails the official clock by about six-tenths of a second.

As a result of this difference, atomic clocks can get out of sync with the Earth and periodically have to be adjusted. Since it's the atomic clocks that are used to set all other clocks, a Leap Second has to be added from time to time to make up the difference.

Since 2008 was a leap year and now will have a leap second, this year will be one of the longest on record, a full 24 hours and 1 second longer than a typical year......sounds silly doesnt it?

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"All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct." -- Carl Sagan

Whats silly is I have no idea what I'm going to do with all my extra time! Should I be making plans for some sort of party? Should I be resetting my clocks now? This is really going to throw me off! Maybe I'll just sleep a little.

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"Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars"

Deja vu... Jump back a few weeks to my Physics class where we discussed the side effects of global warming on the length of the day.




Q: What happens (among many things...) if the polar ice caps melt? (Think about what happens to an ice-skater when they are spinning about their own axis and either extend or retract their arms...)

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Fantom Thrust - SHW Battlebot
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