{"id":837981,"date":"2026-09-06T02:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T02:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/837981\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T02:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T02:40:08","slug":"world-may-ditch-leap-second-in-favor-of-leap-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/837981\/","title":{"rendered":"World May Ditch &#8216;Leap Second&#8217; in Favor of &#8216;Leap Hour&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Earth&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newser.com\/story\/323665\/earth-has-been-rotating-faster-lately-and-meta-is-concerned.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">increasingly quirky spin<\/a> may soon trigger a miniscule but important makeover for the world&#8217;s clocks. International timekeepers are weighing a plan to scrap the occasional &#8220;leap second&#8221; and instead allow time to drift until a full leap hour is needed\u2014likely centuries from now, reports <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/international-timekeepers-to-vote-on-changing-the-leap-second-to-a-leap-hour\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Scientific American<\/a>. The General Conference on Weights and Measures, which meets every four years, will vote on the idea in October, per <a href=\"https:\/\/gizmodo.com\/leap-seconds-were-a-headache-now-timekeepers-are-considering-a-leap-hour-2000783636\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Gizmodo<\/a>. If it passes, the plan could go into effect as early as 2027.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n<p class=\"storyParagraph\">&#13;<br \/>\n                                        Leap seconds, in use since 1972 to keep Coordinated Universal Time in sync with Earth&#8217;s rotation, have long vexed computers, contributing to outages at companies including Meta and Reddit and complicating high-speed trading and aviation systems. With Earth now spinning slightly faster, a never-before-used <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newser.com\/story\/348286\/we-may-soon-need-to-subtract-a-second.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;negative leap second&#8221;<\/a> could be required before 2035, a scenario that experts warn could be even more disruptive. A leap hour would make that step unnecessary. For the record, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newser.com\/story\/236097\/new-years-eve-this-year-is-one-second-longer-than-usual.html\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">last leap second was in 2016<\/a>.&#13;\n                                    <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#13; Earth&#8217;s increasingly quirky spin may soon trigger a miniscule but important makeover for the world&#8217;s clocks. International&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":837982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[354724,24565,79],"class_list":["post-837981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-international-bureau-of-weights-and-measures","tag-leap-second","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=837981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/837981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/837982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=837981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=837981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=837981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}