Timekeepers Vote to Make 'Leap Second' a Full Hour

Time is up for the "leap second." The timekeeping fix was voted out of existence Thursday by scientists, diplomats, and timekeepers at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in France, Smithsonian magazine reports. The idea is to let those seconds, which are added every few years, accumulate until a full leap hour is required. That could be tens of thousands of years from now. "It's kind of a philosophical discussion, because if a leap hour happens, it won't be for a very, very long time," Christian Bizouard, director of the IERS Earth Orientation Center in France, told the Guardian. "What we are doing is pushing back the decision."

The leap second confounds websites and computers more than a leap hour would, and it's caused outages. Also, Earth's spin has accelerated recently, raising the prospect of global timekeepers needing to subtract a second for the first time ever to put Coordinated Universal Time back in sync with Earth's rotation. The leap second has "always been a problem," one expert said. So the conference decided to take a leap. "After 30 years of debates, we are ready," said scientist Noël Dimarcq just before the vote, per Scientific American.