Word: earthed
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...find warm patches of open ground to browse. We who live here, it has been said, do so at the mercy of geology. In much of the West, with its long seismic faults and Yellowstone-centered hot spots, it is for humans a sublimely tenuous coexistence with the earth's fickle tectonic temperaments...
...come to a close will have to endure an extra second - literally. On Dec. 31, just before 7 p.m. Eastern time, a leap second will be added to atomic clocks around the world to realign Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the international standard for atomic clocks, with Earth's rotational period. The reason for the intermittent mismatch between these two measurements lies not with the clocks but with the movement of the planet, which is decelerating at an average rate of two milliseconds...
Space dust, magnetic storms, solar winds and the Earth's atmosphere all create drag, which slows down the planet. Even the amount of snow covering the polar ice caps adds to the rotational lag. But one of the main obstacles is tidal friction. Because the gravitational pull between the moon and the Earth is not uniform, the tidal force stretches the Earth - core, mantle, crust, oceans and all - producing bulges. The Earth's rotation pushes the tidal bulge slightly ahead of the Earth-moon alignment; the moon's gravity, however, yanks the bulges back to keep them in line. This...
...scientists did not periodically correct the difference between the atomic clock and Earth's rotation, within a few hundred years the position of the sun in the sky would noticeably differ with the time on your kitchen clock, an aspect of earthly timekeeping that has caused much consternation historically, vexing everyone from Julius Caesar to Pope Gregory XIII. So, in 1972, an international agreement decreed that instead of continually revising the definition of a second, atomic clocks would be adjusted by adding a leap second each time an appreciable discrepancy was detected by observations made at the International Earth Rotation...
...boasts that he expects "between five and 50,000 people, give or take a few," but then confides that Fonacon's rendezvous point on the Vendéen island le Noirmoutier - chosen because it's a good place to attempt to halt the incoming tide, and thereby stop the earth's rotation, and with it time - will probably draw far fewer revelers. (See pictures of France celebrating Bastille...