2024 is a Leap Year. But the real question is, why? Why do we add an extra day to February once every four years?
To be honest, I didn’t really know. So, to the internet, we go!
According to National Geographic Kids (because it’s early in the morning, I haven’t had much coffee, and we need to keep it simple), Leap days are important because they help our calendar match up with the same seasons every year. Human-made calendars generally have 365 days; the solar year influencing seasons is about 365.2422 days long. (A solar year is how long it takes the Earth to revolve around the sun.)
Even though .2422 of a day doesn’t sound like much, ignoring that fraction means eventually, our seasons won’t fall in the same months every year. School years might subsequently start in the spring instead of late summer. And if the calendar didn’t match the seasons, farmers would have a more difficult time growing crops, which could affect food supplies.
That’s why, in the 16th century, the Gregorian calendar — the most commonly used today — started adding leap days to match the calendar with the seasons. Because four .2422 days equals about one day, February 29 is now added to most years that are divisible by four.
Many cultures tried making calendars but never quite got it right.
To fix his culture’s calendar, Roman emperor Julius Caesar created the “Year of Confusion” when he decided that 46 B.C. would be 445 days long instead of 365 days long. He then made a 365.25-day year — a bit longer than the 365.2422 solar year — that added a leap day every fourth year.
But even this Roman system wasn’t right. The slight difference between 365.25 and 365.2422 made each calendar year about 11 minutes shorter than the seasonal calendar, so the calendar was an entire day short every 128 years.
By the 16th century, significant dates and holidays had drifted by ten days. Pope Gregory XIII unveiled his Gregorian calendar in Rome in 1582. That year, he dropped ten days from October to sync things up. He also developed a new leap year system that used the solar year of 365.2422 days, added one leap day every four years, but dropped three leap days every 400 years to keep the calendars from drifting.
It doesn’t sound obvious, but the system has kept the calendar and the seasons in sync for over 400 years. While there’s still a 30-second drift every year, the calendar won’t be off for more than a day for another 3,300 years!
So there ya go! Now you know why we have Leap Years!
And here’s a fun Leap Year fact for you. According to a “Super DC Calendar” released in 1976, Superman’s birthday is February 29th!
Other famous Leap Year babies include rapper Ja Rule, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, actors Anthony Sabbato Jr. and Dennis Farina, Pope Paul III, and serial killer Aileen Wuornos.
