Is Time Stopping in 2029? This Study Says That We'll Be Shaving a Second Off the World Clock Very Soon

Our sense of time is changing as the earth's spin changes in an unprecedented way. And for the very first time ever, timekeepers are anticipating having to subtract a second from our clocks in the near future.

A "negative leap second" is bound to happen around 2029, according to the journal Nature. Duncan Agnew, the study's lead author and geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego added: “It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable. It’s yet another indication that we’re in a very unusual time.”

It's said to be a confluence of many factors, such as physics, climate change, technology, and even politics. For centuries, the earth has been slowing down at a varied rate. This is primarily because of the effect of tides.

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There are actually two versions of time, astronomical and atomic. The former is behind by 2.5 milliseconds. While these may seem like only fractions of seconds, they add up every couple of years.

In 1972, the timekeepers of the world even added a "leap second" in June or December just so astronomical time could catch up, with the introduction of the Coordinated Universal Time or UTC. Between then and 2016, there have been a recorded 27 separate leap seconds as the earth decreased in speed. After that, the slowdown rate was so slow that the earth was, well, experiencing a speedup.

Interestingly, the advent of computers would add a certain precision to timekeeping. However, that doesn't mean that systems don't mismanage the leap second. Notably, in 2012, Qantas Airlines, Reddit, and more had issues with that exact fraction. And addressing that isn't as easy as just adjusting the clocks. Tech conglomerates like Google even have their own fallback solutions when the leap second is messed up.

Timekeeping will actually be sort of rebooted in the 2030s, as most of the world's timekeepers agreed that it would change standards for the leap year by then. Nevertheless, a second off the world and time is still weird as hell.