Did You Know That You Get An Extra Second Today? That’s Right, It’s Leap Second Day!

Just like with Leap Year, every now and then the scientists or whoever officially keeps track of time have to do a little reset on the ol’ world clock. So today, June 30th, 2015, aka Leap Second Day, we get a whole extra second to mess around with however we want!

Since I don’t know any of the hows and whys of all of this, here’s an explanation from scientific stalwart People magazine

Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is the chronological standard regulating the world’s official clocks as well as aviation- and weather-monitoring activities. It must sometimes be adjusted to account for the Earth’s irregular rotation.

On Tuesday night, clocks around the world will click from 23:59:59 to 23:59:60 rather than immediately going to midnight on Wednesday.

And here’s a video that also might help explain how the Earth’s rotation is measured and could be the cause of this needed extra second. Warning though, the video is by NASA and it’s very, very NASA-y…

And while getting some extra time is great, even if it’s just one second, if you run into any bugs on your favorite Web sites tomorrow that one extra second could be to blame. The last time we had an extra second added sites like Mozilla, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Reddit and others had issues.

So how are you going to spend your sweet extra second today? Me? I’m going to watch one of Last Week Tonight’s one-second videos. Especially since they were nice enough to create this countdown clock just for the occasion.

Clock image by Shutterstock