In advance of hurricane force winds moving into Colorado earlier this week, Xcel Energy preemptively shut off power to protect areas of the state from extreme fire danger. But due to the outage, time (very) briefly stood still at the NIST Internet Time Service facility in Boulder.
Boulder’s NIST F-4 atomic clock uses cesium atoms to measure the exact length of a second. These tools are used for many things, including GPS systems, data centers, scientific research, telecommunications, power generation and other systems that require ultra-precise timekeeping.
National Institute of Standards and Technology
According to NIST, “NIST-F4 measures an unchanging frequency in the heart of cesium atoms, the internationally agreed-upon basis for defining the second since 1967. The clock is based on a ‘fountain’ design that represents the gold standard of accuracy in timekeeping. NIST-F4 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 National Institute of Standards and Technology debuted an NIST F-2 atomic clock in Boulder in 2014. A new NIST F-4 clock at the Boulder Department of Commerce site came online earlier this year.
When power was cut to the facility on Wednesday and the NIST Internet Time Service listserv switched to a back-up generator, power to the servers briefly lapsed.
National Institute of Standards and Technology
“As a result of that lapse, NIST UTC drifted by about 4 microseconds, which is 4 millionths of a second. For comparison, it takes about 350,000 microseconds to blink or 150,000 microseconds to snap your fingers,” said NIST spokesperson Rebecca Jacobson. “For most NIST time users, this drift would not even register. For those users in industries such as telecommunications and aerospace, or other laboratories where such a drift could be noticeable, we always provide access to other networks in other locations to ensure uninterrupted service. We had notified those high-end users of a potential power outage so they could be prepared to access those networks as a precaution.”
She explained that the impact on the time service is minimal because it’s maintained by a network of clocks and servers in different locations. Jacobson says the system is not at risk and there are redundancies in place.
Power to the Boulder site remains off, she says. Once it’s restored, they will be able to recalibrate the clock and correct the four microsecond drift.
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