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Time to stand still in early hours of tomorrow

Time is set to stand still for one second in the early hours of tomorrow (Wednesday) morning.

0:59:59am British Summer Time (BST) will be repeated tomorrow morning to realign the world's clocks with the planet's orbit, similar in theory to leap years.

The second will occur at one second to midnight coordinated universal time (UTC) and will be the 26th "leap second" in history, with the last instance being in 2012.

Leap seconds were introduced in 1972, with ten seconds added to world clock's on that occasion. 2012's occurrence caused temporary disruption for websites such as Gawker, LinkedIn and Reddit, and it also caused the delays of 400 Quantas flights in Australia as staff had to switch to manual check-ins.

“There are consequences of tinkering with time. Because leap seconds are only introduced sporadically it is difficult to implement them in computers and mistakes can cause systems to fail temporarily. “However, we have always taken the Earth’s rotation as the ultimate reference for timekeeping, and astronomers and navigators still make use of it. We shouldn’t break the link without carefully weighing the consequences”, said Dr. Peter Whibberley, senior research scientist with the Time and Frequency group at the National Physical Laboratory in London, who are responsible for adding the extra second to UK time.