After a careful preparation, the minute was stretched to 61 seconds just before 8 o'clock Beijing time on January 1, 2006 at the National Time Service Center, a research arm of CAS on time and frequency at Lintong in northwest China's Shaanxi Province.
Globally, an extra second occurred on Dec. 31, 2005, at 23:59:60, Greenwich Mean Time, according to the International Earth Rotation Service. It is the first leap second in seven years and the 23rd one that has been inserted since 1972 when an international timekeeping agreement was signed. Leap seconds are inserted since atomic clocks tend to go slightly ahead of the earth's rotation, largely because the rotation of the earth has been slowing down.
