69 Countries Vote to Abolish Leap Seconds — SkimNews
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- Representatives from 69 countries voted on 15 October at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) meeting in Versailles, France, to abolish leap seconds and adopt a 'leap hour' system that takes effect 20 May 2027.
- Twenty-seven leap seconds have been added to coordinated universal time since they were introduced in 1972 to compensate for Earth's slowing rotation, but prior insertions have crashed websites and disrupted airlines' booking systems.
- Earth's rotation has recently begun to accelerate slightly, raising the possibility of needing a 'first-ever negative leap second,' warned Noël Dimarcq, who heads the BIPM's committee on time and frequency.
- Emily Akkermans, curator of time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, said the eventual drift under the new system would feel like 'living on daylight saving time' permanently.
- The BIPM also requested proposals on redefining the second using more accurate optical clocks and asked international agencies to begin defining a universal time standard for the Moon.
- Setnam Shemar at the UK's National Physical Laboratory stressed that physicists will still track Earth's rotation for astronomy and celestial navigation even after leap seconds disappear.
Why it matters: The vote ends a 55-year practice of inserting occasional leap seconds — incompatible with the precise timekeeping that stock markets, GPS, and mobile networks now depend on. The 'leap hour' buffer means the practical correction won't be needed for hundreds or thousands of years, but the BIPM's parallel push to redefine the second via optical clocks and establish lunar time signals that global timekeeping is being rebuilt from the ground up.
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