[X] My Assistant

[helvick]

Rather poor BBC article on the proposal to abolish leap seconds.

The reporting seems to be awfully jingoistic (The Americans want to abolish Greenwich!! Man the beaches chaps!!) and incomplete.

I work in a field where Leap seconds are a minor annoyance but there are many areas where it's much more than that (GPS springs to mind). That said almost all systems that deal in high precision timing over extended periods of time must already be able to handle these adjustments.

This statement is totally bogus fill provided by the reporter:

Without the leap second astronomers would lose track of distant stars and spacecraft. And it would even affect navigation on the Earth. But it's that leap second that some American scientists want to scrap.

What's worse is that it's tagged on to an actual quote from Dr. Robert Massey who makes the totally accurate statement that precision timekeeping is vital to Astronomy but says nothing about any effect abolishing the Leap Second would have on that (because there isn't any).

[Chmee]

It said in the article that leap seconds have to be added every 18 months or so...due to the slowing of the Earth's rotation. That is .67 second every year.

This seems far too high for the slowing of the Earth's rotation. Running that backward 2000 years it means each day was 22 minutes shorter at 1 AD and almost 2 hours shorter 10,000 years ago, which is obviously not the case.

Could the cause of the leap second be due more to the precession of the Earth's axis rather than the actual slowing?