Are you prepared for tonight’s ‘leap second?’

Something that has only happened 25 times since 1972 will once again happen tonight.

A “leap second” is similar to a leap year, but on a smaller scale. With a leap year, a whole day is added to the calendar, whereas with a leap second, one second is added to the day.

It happens tonight just before 8 p.m., an extra second will be added to clocks to accommodate for the gradual slow down of the earth’s rotation.

As we know, the earth rotates on its axis, which gives us our nights and our days. This rotation takes 24 hours; but is actually slowing down. For this reason, a “leap second” is added to our clocks, on average, once every couple years.

After 7:59:59 p.m. Tuesday evening, instead of jumping to 8:00:00 p.m. an additional second will be added and the clock will read 7:59:60 p.m. This begs the question… what will you do with your extra second?