Every four years, February 29th pops up on
the calendar. Why?
Apparently, a year is not exactly the
accepted 365 days, but rather, 365.242190 days. Which means it’s about 365
days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. Rounding it up to six hours, or a
quarter of a day, it doesn’t seem like much , but when you add it up, the year
would lose a whole day every four years.
Therefore, leap year would occur on years that would be divisible by
four except for the years which are
both divisible by 100 and not by 400. So the first half of the 21st
century would be 2000, 2004, 2008, 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036, 2040,
2044, 2048, and of course, this year, 2012.
Okay, fine. One day? Big deal. But let’s
take a Christmas day, or December 25th, for example. If we were to
lose a day every year, in 20 years, Christmas would come before the winter
solstice. In 200 years, Christmas would come in autumn (seasons are based on
Earth’s position to the sun, so they don’t change). Then it would come in summer, then in spring.
I find it hard to imagine Santa Claus
working through the Arctic summer heat in a bathing suit and his reindeers’
hooves scraping against the dry and cracking shingles of the roofs. Adding a
day every four year simply synchronizes our calendar with the astronomical
seasons.
So, we do it so we don’t have any Santa Clauses running around wholesale
warehouses in Speedos.
- By Alicia Y. Zheng
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