The decision as to whether or not to abolish leap seconds has been deferred until at least 2015, after a meeting at the Radiocommunications Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland. Leap seconds are added to Universal Co-ordinated Time (UTC) to keep the time signal from atomic clocks to within one second of that determined by the rotation of the Earth.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto

In the end, no vote took place at the Assembly and the original proposal to abolish leap seconds has been resubmitted for further work and consultation. This work will support consideration of the future of leap seconds at the next World Radiocommunication Conference in 2015.

The UK government and the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) supports the decision not to change the current system and the deferral will give the international community more time to weigh up the evidence for and against making the change. In the meantime, the atomic timescale will continue to be linked to the solar time.

Professor Patrick Gill, Senior NPL Fellow of Time & Frequency, said:

"The deferral will give everyone a further chance to investigate the possible consequences of making such a fundamental change to the way the world tells the time. For now, NPL and other standards institutes will continue to add leap seconds into the timescale and the link between UTC and Solar time will remain."

While it is recognised that for a small number of users there are technical issues with linking the timescales, leap seconds have already been in use for almost 40 years and the international community needs to be absolutely sure before making any changes to a system that works for the vast majority of users.

Future discussions will focus on better understanding the broader social implications of the potential change and hopefully a decision that the international community agrees on can be reached.

More information on the leap second.

More on NPL's work on Time.