Why is 2024 a leap year? When was the last one?

It’s a special year for those born on 29th February as they get to celebrate their birthday. For the rest of us, it means we have an extra day in the year, but unfortunately, it’s not a holiday. Leap Year occurs every four years, and in 2024, we will have 366 days instead of the standard 365. Leap years are necessary to keep our calendar in sync with the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Without this little tweak, the calendar would eventually get out of step, and it would cause chaos. So, the addition of an extra day in February every four years helps keep everything in order.

Why do we have leap years?

Certainly, I’d be happy to help you with that. A leap year, which is also known as an intercalary year or a bissextile year, occurs because the earth takes slightly less than 365 1/4 days to orbit the sun, which was not accounted for when the Julian calendar was created. To be more precise, it takes approximately 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds, which equals 365.242190 days.

Although a quarter of a day may not seem like a significant amount of time, over a few hundred years, it can add up and disrupt the seasons. This would mean that the timing of certain holidays and events would be off, such as having a sunny Christmas in the northern hemisphere. In order to account for the difference in time, an extra day - February 29th - was added to the calendar every 4 years. However, you may have noticed that 4 times 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 56 seconds does not quite add up to 24 hours, but rather 23.262222. This means that not every 4 years can be a leap year without some further calculations.

The rule for determining leap years is that if a year is divisible by 100 but not by 400, leap year is skipped. For instance, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years because they were divisible by 100 but not by 400. The next time a leap year will be skipped is in the year 2100.

When is the next leap year and when was the last one?

The next leap year will be in 2028 as they fall every four years, except in the situation previously mentioned. If you’re already in 2028, you should look for a more updated article. But just in case you were wondering and not leave you scrambling across the internet ether, after that, the next one will be in 2032.

The last leap year that we had was back in 2020, and we know what happened then: Joe Biden took over as US President from Donald Trump as the covid-19 pandemic ripped through the world; the UK withdrew from the European Union; Megan Markle and Prince Harry stepped down as senior royals; we lost Kobe and Gianna Bryant as well as Chadwick Boseman, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and George Floyd; Trump was impeached, murder hornets arrived, social distancing, Tiger King, panic buying, ZOOM, a fly on Mike Pence’s head, X Æ A-12, that terrible celebrity rendition of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’, and wildfires that swept all the way from Australia to Florida as global warming took its effect on the choking planet. Fingers crossed that we’ve used up all the leap-year bad luck for this time around.

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