The dirty, rotten scoundrel that is 2016 just won’t end.
In the past 365 days, someone shot a poor gorilla, a slew of our favorite celebrities passed to the other side, the United Kingdom up and left the European Union, America suffered through a soul-crushing election, and we’re all pretty much done with it. But 2016 won’t let us go that easily.
This year’s New Year’s Eve will be one second longer than normal.
Known as a leap second, this extra bit of time is due to the fact that the rotation of Earth doesn’t take exactly 24 hours—it’s just slightly longer thanks to the slowing of the planet’s rotation. To account for this, every few years, the atomic clocks that determine Coordinated Universal Time—the world’s official standard time—add a single second every few years. 2016 is one of those years.
For Americans on the East Coast, there will be an extra second between 6:59pm and 7pm (6:59:60, to be exact), which means it’ll happen between 5:59pm and 6pm for those of you living in Central Time, and so on.
The extra second caused a whole lot of technical glitches for a slew of websites back in 2012, but many servers have been updated to handle it this time around. So don’t worry. (OK, worry a little.)
2016 has been extended by 1 second just to give the remaining beloved celebrities an extra second of tension.#leapsecond
— HAL 9000 (@HAL9000_) December 30, 2016
Of course, given that this is 2016, the year of unexpected horrible things happening, we’re guessing it’ll go a bit more like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrFuguc0nU
Happy New Year!
H/T Mashable
