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Social and legal problems could be future snag for “continuous time”

ITU week-long meeting in Geneva debated the leap second and other telecommunications issues 16-20 January 2012 (photo: ©2012 ITU)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – One of the most pressing questions in Geneva in the past week, to read world media, has been that of the death sentence or its commute for the leap second, which has been used since 1972.

Officials from 150 countries, meeting at the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) this week debated whether or not to end the practice, which not everyone agrees is necessary. Thursday 19 January the group agreed not to agree for now, and to review the state of the leap second in 2015.

For those who are not close clock watchers, the leap second is a second that is added to clocks every year or so to keep them synchronized with the rising and setting sun, a complex task that requires reporting from hundreds of stations around the world. They are added at a rate that totals about one minute every 91 years. Nature today explains it as a measure “that keeps atomic clocks in step with Earth’s rotation and the position of the Sun in the sky.”

Nature concludes that “participants reached a state of confusion, rather than consensus, so the decision about the leap-second’s fate has been deferred to 2015. ”

The decision to “to defer the development of a continuous time standard in order to address the concerns of countries that use the current system of the leap second in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)” was made, according to a statement issued by the ITU that puts a happier spin on the vote, “to ensure that all the technical options have been fully addressed in further studies related to the issue.”

Specifically, suppressing the leap second would make continuous time scale available for “modern electronic navigation and computerized systems to operate with and eliminate the need for specialized ad hoc time systems,” says the ITU, but this could have “social and legal consequences when the accumulated difference between UT1 – Earth rotation time – would reach a perceivable level (2 to 3 minutes in 2100 and about 30 minutes in 2700).”