Technology & Science
Global Timekeepers Move to Scrap Leap Second in 2027
Delegates meeting in Versailles this week are expected to approve a resolution advancing the abolition of the leap second from 2035 to 20 May 2027 and allow UTC to drift until a future ‘leap hour’ is needed.
Focusing Facts
- The 69 BIPM member states vote 12–15 Oct 2026; if passed, leap seconds cease after 20 May 2027.
- Leap seconds have been invoked 27 times since their 1972 introduction, most recently on 31 Dec 2016.
- A 2025 International Earth Rotation Service forecast put the odds of an unprecedented negative leap second at 30 % by 2035, prompting the fast-track decision.
Context
Timekeeping reforms are rare but dramatic: Pope Gregory XIII’s 1582 calendar dropped ten whole days to realign dates with the seasons, and Britain’s 1847 adoption of ‘railway time’ standardised clocks for an emerging industrial network. The pending leap-second abolition similarly reflects a shift from celestial rhythms toward machine imperatives—continuous, uniform atomic time that better serves GPS, finance and global data centres than the uneven spin of Earth. On a century scale it marks the triumph of laboratory precision over planetary motion; on a millennium scale it merely defers reconciliation to a single leap-hour, much as the Gregorian reform deferred calendar drift for thousands of years. Whether future societies choose to re-anchor time to the sky or embrace ever more abstract metrics, this vote signals the present era’s priority: keeping the digital infrastructure humming, even at the cost of severing one of humanity’s oldest links to the heavens.
Perspectives
Tech-industry and science-focused outlets
e.g., ABC News, IFLScience, RNZ, Sur in English — Portray the leap second as an obsolete nuisance that routinely crashes modern software and must be scrapped in favour of a far-off “leap hour” to protect global digital infrastructure. By foregrounding big-tech outage anecdotes and quoting metrology agencies, they echo corporate and engineering priorities while skimming over cultural or astronomical arguments for keeping civil time tied to Earth’s rotation.
Astronomy‐heritage academics highlighted in international news reports
e.g., CNN International, lite.cnn.com, KMBC 9 — Argue that leap seconds still matter because they preserve a comforting, centuries-old link between human timekeeping and the planet’s actual spin, and claim the technical hassle is overstated. This stance leans on tradition and intellectual sentiment, downplaying the untested risk of a negative leap second and the cost of re-engineering critical networks cited by metrologists and tech firms.
General-interest magazines and explanatory outlets
e.g., The Week, BBC derivatives, Bluewin — Frame the anticipated vote as a pragmatic compromise—leap seconds are likely doomed for practical reasons, yet their loss is a small cultural sacrifice that future generations may revisit with a once-in-a-millennium ‘leap hour.’ By striking a middle tone, these pieces can dramatise the story (‘mayhem in the digital time-stamped continuum’) to attract readers while avoiding firm advocacy, giving limited scrutiny to either side’s strongest technical claims.
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