Year 2015 will have one Extra Second to compensate for the Earth’s slow rotation.

Year 2015 will have one extra second to compensate for the Earth’s slowing rotation. It will be at the end of June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.

 Earth’s rotation

Earth’s rotation is the rotation of the solid Earth around its own axis. The Earth rotates from the west towards the east. As viewed from the North Star or polestar Polaris, the Earth turns counter-clockwise.

The North Pole, also known as the Geographic North Pole or Terrestrial North Pole, is the point in the Northern Hemisphere where the Earth’s axis of rotation meets its surface. This point is distinct from the Earth’s North Magnetic Pole. The South Pole is the other point where the Earth’s axis of rotation intersects its surface, in Antarctica.

The Earth rotates once in about 24 hours with respect to the sun and once every 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds with respect to the stars. Earth’s rotation is slowing slightly with time; thus, a day was shorter in the past. This is due to the tidal effects the Moon has on Earth’s rotation. Atomic clocks show that a modern day is longer by about 1.7 milliseconds than a century ago, slowly increasing the rate at which UTC is adjusted by leap seconds.

Leap second

A leap second is a one-second adjustment that is occasionally applied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) in order to keep its time of day close to the mean solar time. Without such a correction, time reckoned by Earth’s rotation drifts away from atomic time because of irregularities in the Earth’s rate of rotation. Since this system of correction was implemented in 1972, 25 such leap seconds have been inserted. The most recent one happened on June 30, 2012 at 23:59:60 UTC. A leap second will again be inserted at the end of June 30, 2015 at 23:59:60 UTC.