Thursday 17 / July / 2025
Muscat: Oman - and the world - will be forced to endure an extra second in 2016 thanks to the gradual slowing of the earth’s rotation.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference System (IERS), which standardises world time, will keep clocks running to 60 seconds, instead of 59 on New Year’s Eve, before changing to the New Year.
This will provide an extra second to make resolutions, toast the New Year and wave goodbye to the year of austerity.
According to Sulaiman Al Busaidi, curator of the PDO planetarium, the change has to do with the earth’s rotation, which is not perfectly steady and is slowing as time passes.
“The original definition of a day was 86,400 seconds, but due to the slowing rotation it changes every day by 0.002 seconds. After two days it is 0.004 seconds, and so on.
“When the difference amounts to about one second, this is this difference that requires the addition of a leap second,” he said.
‘Leap seconds’ have been added 26 times since rotation based time adjustments were introduced in 1972, when an extra 10 seconds was added to clocks to compensate for changes.
With so many wars, famines, celebrity deaths and major changes in the world in 2016, most people are eagerly awaiting the new year.
Also, 2016 has been a challenging time for business around the world, as economic uncertainties plagued world markets.
Oman, along with its GCC neighbours, saw oil prices fall to record lows at the start of the year, and severe austerity measures put in place. “It was a hard year,” said Maaz Firdous, an engineering consultant, summing up 2016.
“The once flourishing construction markets were hit hard. Everyone is looking forward to the New Year, new contracts and a better economic outlook. I would have preferred the extra second some other year,” he added.
Oman took unprecedented measures in 2016 to reduce deficits caused by low oil prices by introducing austerity measures that included cuts in fuel subsidies, which increased prices by up to 50 per cent. “It is just one second, but the significance is so considerable because of the tough time this year brought for us. I have seen company account books suffer, and companies are just praying that 2016 ends and the New Year brings some respite for them,” said Aamir Patel, a chartered accountant.
Outages
In the past, the ‘leap second’ has caused outages in popular websites, such as Netflix, Reddit and Foursquare.
In 2012, it forced passengers to check-in by hand, instead of using computer systems, delaying nearly 400 flights, while in 2015, interruptions of nearly 40 minutes occurred on Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Amazon. Although reminiscent of Y2K, the turn of the millennium panic which threatened to send computer systems haywire, the adding of one second is a regular occurrence and major technical glitches are rare.
If the leap second system was not in place, by the year 2100 clocks would be one minute ahead of time. It is expected that there will be many more leap seconds to come in the near future, as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) voted last year to retain the practice until the year 2023, before examining the need for such actions again.
