Fun Facts for Leap Year 2016

2016 is a leap year, meaning there will be a February 29 this year. Then, we won’t have another February 29 until 2020.

Why is that?

The purpose of leap year can be perplexing to some people. So Lynch Ford Chevrolet has put together some enlightening answers to questions you may be asking about leap year.

Q. Why do we mess with our calendar by adding a day to February, but only once in four years?

A. Leap years synchronize our calendar year with the solar year (the Earth's revolutions around the sun). It takes the Earth approximately 365.242189 days—or 365¼ days—to orbit the Sun, called a tropical year. However, our Gregorian calendar has only 365 days in a year, so if we didn't add a day about every four years, our calendar would get behind by six hours every year.

Q. How did leap year even originate?

A. The Egyptians came up with the idea to add a leap day once every four years to keep the calendar in sync with the solar year. In 45 BC, Julius Caesar adopted this for his calendar. But the Julian calendar had only one rule: any year evenly divisible by four would be a leap year, making this formula still off by eleven minutes and fourteen seconds a year.  By the 1500s, the vernal equinox was falling around March 11 instead of March 21. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII created the Gregorian calendar. He adjusted the calendar by moving the date ahead eleven days, then coined the term leap year with February 29 as the official date, and introduced the exception to the rule for leap years.

Q. What’s our modern-day formula for leap year, then?

A. In our Gregorian calendar, leap year occurs in every year that is divisible by four and only in the century years that can be evenly divided by 400. Therefore, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700 and 1900 were not because they are not divisible by 400. Thanks to leap year, it will take 3,300 years for the Gregorian calendar to diverge by one day.