An international gathering of scientists, diplomats and timekeepers at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles voted to stop inserting leap seconds into Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Instead of the occasional one-second adjustments used since 1972, members agreed to let UTC run continuously and tolerate divergence from Earth-rotation time (UT1) of up to one hour (3,600 seconds). When that larger offset becomes unacceptable, a single leap hour will be inserted very infrequently; experts estimate such an adjustment likely won’t be needed for more than a millennium. The change takes effect May 20, 2027 (World Metrology Day) and ends the routine procedure that has historically tied civil time to the position of the sky.
The decision responds to technical and operational risks: atomic-clock-based UTC increasingly conflicts with irregular changes in Earth’s spin, and a forecasted negative leap second (which would move clocks backward) raised fears of outages and software failures - an outcome engineers compared to a miniature Y2K. Because UTC is the reference for computers, satellites and navigation systems, making it continuous simplifies infrastructure and reduces the chance of leap-second-related bugs. The shift formalizes a longer separation between human solar time and the atomic standard, trading strict astronomical alignment for greater stability in modern technology.
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