U.N. body keeps leap second around for the moment

Clocks around the world are ticking portentously toward a scientific showdown on Thursday in Geneva, where delegates at a gathering of the International Telecommunication Union — the UN agency that regulates global measurement of time — will decide whether to abolish the "leap second."


Canada and Britain are among the nations poised to resist scrapping the practice of adding one second to the world's clocks every few years to account for slight wobbles in the Earth's movement through space, the result of earthquakes, variations in tides and other "error"-inducing natural phenomena.


But the U.S., France, Japan and a host of other pro-reform nations seem likely to prevail in getting rid of the leap second, widely deemed a troublesome relic of bygone days in an era with satellites requiring continuous, pinpoint accuracy in timekeeping, all geared to hyper-precise "atomic clocks" that are maintained by scientific institutes around the world — including, ironically, the National Research Council of Canada.


While Canada's atomic clock would remain part of a global network of devices required to maintain the new, "Co-ordinated Universal Time" — or UTC — the occasional one-second adjustments necessary to keep those atomic clocks in sync with our imperfectly orbiting Earth would be eliminated, ending the 40-year reign of so-called "celestial" universal time, or UT1.


In November, an Industry Canada official told Postmedia News that this country opposes the proposed abolition of the leap second.


The debate is over whether Earth's clocks and electronics should run on strictly machine time, as measured by precise atomic clocks, or the actual rotation of the Earth. The problem is that an Earth day isn't precisely 86,400 seconds, it's a little off, making the leap seconds necessary every few years.


The next leap second is scheduled (slightly) to lengthen our day on June 30, 2012.