World May Ditch 'Leap Second' in Favor of 'Leap Hour'

Earth's increasingly quirky spin may soon trigger a miniscule but important makeover for the world's clocks. International timekeepers are weighing a plan to scrap the occasional "leap second" and instead allow time to drift until a full leap hour is needed—likely centuries from now, reports Scientific American. The General Conference on Weights and Measures, which meets every four years, will vote on the idea in October, per Gizmodo. If it passes, the plan could go into effect as early as 2027.

Leap seconds, in use since 1972 to keep Coordinated Universal Time in sync with Earth'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 "negative leap second" 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 last leap second was in 2016.