The world is going to get an extra second or a "leap second" on June 30 this year.
On Jan. 5, the International Earth Rotation Service (IERS) that governs leap seconds announced that the extra second will be added in June as the Earth will take an extra second to rotate.
"Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC [Coordinated Universal Time] at the end of the months of December or June," per IERS. "A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2015."
This is not the first time that an extra second has been added to the clock. The last time an extra tick was added to the world's time was in 2012. The upcoming leap second on June 30 will be the 26th occasion that an extra second will be added since 1972. Experts suggest that the rotation of the Earth may slow down due to tides and changes to its core.
Many countries also debate if it is necessary to add an extra second, which can cause a chaos in the digital world. The last addition of the second resulted in many websites crashing. Software platforms find it difficult to cope with the addition of a second.
Yelp, Foursquare, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and many other websites crashed. People using the Linux operating system and some software programmes written in Java also experienced problems. However, Google has developed a technique that copes up with the extra second. The company refers the novel technique as 'leap smear' where it adds milliseconds gradually to its system clocks before the official arrival of the extra second to avoid any meltdown.
The U.S. wants to get rid of the leap second as they can cause disruption to the precision systems that are used for communication, navigation and other services.
However, on the other hand, the U.K. suggests that it may be risky to omit that extra second as it will allow for a divergence between Earth's rotation and the time kept by atomic clocks.
The number of extra seconds added in the recent decades is not as high as in 1970's, when the most number of leap seconds were added to the international time.
