Owing to the earth's slow-down in rotation rate, NASA has announced that it will be adding one second to the clock. What seems like a minor change is expected to bring a major chaos across technology and industrial domains, including airlines.

According to a report on Telegraph, NASA has announced that it will be adding one leap second to the clock on June 30, 2015 to account for the gradual delay in the time records caused due to the slowing down of Earth's rotation cycle.

Like Us on Facebook

The last leap second was added in 2012, and when this was done, all major technology companies including Mozilla, Reddit, Foursquare, Yelp, LinkedIn, and even StumbleUpon suffered crashes. This time too, a similar fate is predicted for all the technology companies as NASA gets ready to account for the extra time. The move is important, scientifically, because it will ensure that the time is able to catch up with the atomic time.

Other issues that occurred last year include the grounding of flights across major airports as check-in systems crashed leaving passengers in a lurch. Even the experts at National Physical Laboratory in Britain, who will be adding the second to the English clocks, predicted problems on the trading floors as transactions could be delayed when the time changes.

As Peter Whibberley, Senior Research Scientist in the Time and Frequency group at NPL puts it, since leap seconds are added sporadically, it is often difficult for technology companies to implement the change in machines and software programs leading to major issues across the globe.

While the European markets will remain closed when this happens, the trading across Japan, America and South East Asia is expected to take the blow. Explaining the shift, a report on Gizmodo says that a day is usually 86,400 seconds long; however, this length of day depends on the rotation speed of earth, which has been reducing.

Ever since 1820, the average length of the day has been increasing. The leap second added to the clocks actually helps in accounting for this delay and is therefore important as this keeps the Earth's time and atomic time in tandem with each other. 

Tagsleap second, 30th June leap second, extra time added to clock, NASA