You might be wondering why UTC is the abbreviation for Coordinated Universal Time. UTC incorporates measurements of the Earth's rotation as well as averaged readings from around 400 atomic clocks around the world, according to the website. In 1967, a committee at the United Nations officially adopted UTC as a standard that's more accurate than GMT for setting clocks. Earthquakes, melting ice sheets and natural oscillations in our planet's motion can cause changes of a few fractions of a second in the amount of time it takes the Earth to spin on its axis, according to NASA. The time standard against which clocks were set then became known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).īut by the middle of the 20th century, the new technology of the atomic clock, which can measure time with incredible accuracy, was showing that the Earth's rotation actually varied slightly from day to day. At the conference, 41 delegates from 25 countries chose to set the prime meridian - the zero point for longitude lines - as passing through Greenwich, England, according to. But there was no universally agreed-upon equivalent for lines of longitude, which run north to south. Lines of latitude, which run east to west around our planet, had always been measured from the equator. In 1884, members met at the International Meridian Conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss a way to synchronize clocks around the globe.
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