EARTHDATE: January 8, 2006

OFFICIAL NEWS
Page 10

The year 2005 was longer than you expected. One second longer, to be exact. That's because a leap second was added to the year in order to compensate for changes in the Earth's rotation.

The extra second was added to atomic clocks at midnight on New Year's Eve, Coordinated Universal Time (that's the same as the UK's winter time, what used to be known as Greenwich Mean Time) so the clocks would all have gone as follows:

23:59:58
23:59:59
23:59:60 <--- the extra second
00:00:00

This is the first time in seven years that a leap second has been needed. The Earth's rotation is slowing down which means that eventually, the time kept by atomic clocks, and the time that the sun rises and sets, would get out of sync - probably not enough to bother you or me, but enough to affect astronomy, navigation and so on.

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