Scientists Add 1 ‘Tock’ to World’s Clocks

One second was added to the world’s clocks at midnight Thursday to compensate for a gradual slowing of Earth’s movement around the sun, Britain’s Royal Observatory said.

Highly accurate modern clocks have shown that Earth’s movement is slowing, and the measurement of time has to be periodically adjusted to keep in step.

“The additional second to be added to the atomic clocks at midnight . . . will bring these most accurate instruments of the measurement of time back in line with the relationship between the sun and the Earth,” the observatory’s Dr. Kristin Lippincott said in a statement.

“Time is completely artificial,” Lippincott said. “All we are doing is taking two different ways of measuring time and making sure those two are harmonious.”

Since 1884, time has been measured on a zoning system that starts at the Greenwich Meridian, an imaginary line that lies at zero degrees longitude and runs through Greenwich. Nineteen seconds have been added to the world’s clocks since 1972.