America’s official clock briefly lagged this week, thanks to a windstorm in Colorado and a backup system that didn’t kick in as planned. The nation’s time is maintained at the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s lab in Boulder, where 16 atomic clocks feed into what’s known as NIST UTC—official US time as determined by the Commerce Department and the US Navy, per NPR. When severe winds knocked out power to the facility on Wednesday and a backup generator didn’t work, some clocks lost connection to NIST’s measurement and distribution systems, according to supervisory research physicist Jeff Sherman.
The type of NIST-F4 atomic clock used in the Boulder facility “ticks at such a steady rate that if it had started running 100 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed, it would be off by less than a second today,” the agency notes, per CBS News. The clocks themselves kept running on battery backup after last week’s power outage, which Gizmodo notes lasted about two hours, but the disruption left NIST’s version of coordinated universal time 4.8 microseconds—just under 5 millionths of a second—behind where it should have been, per NPR. For comparison, NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson notes it takes about 350,000 microseconds to blink.
Sherman said whether that tiny lag matters depends on who’s describing it. Most people wouldn’t notice, for instance, but that kind of discrepancy can affect high-precision systems, including telecommunications networks, GPS, and other critical infrastructure, Sherman notes. NIST says “high-end” users also have access to other timekeeping networks and were warned of the disruption. By Saturday evening, power to the facility was back, and crews were assessing damage and working to bring NIST’s clocks back into perfect sync.

You must be logged in to post a comment.