Why Is There A Leap Day? Today’s Google Doodle Sheds Light On Leap Year’s Extra Day

Google's Leap Day logo leads to search results aimed explaining why we get an extra day every four years.

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Google leap year feature image
Today is Leap Day, and Google is marking the special occasion — an extra day that comes around every four years — with an animated Leap Day doodle featuring three bunnies in a row.

As explained on Google’s Doodle blog, Leap Day happens every four years (unless the year is divisible by 100) to keep our calendar in sync with the Earth’s rotation around the sun.

[pullquote]Without Leap Day, we’d be out of sync by about six hours per year.[/pullquote]

Today’s Leap Day Google doodle is being displayed on Google’s home pages around the world and leads to a search for “why is there a leap day?

Today’s doodle was designed by doodler Olivia Hyuhn. Google shared some of Hyuhn’s early 2016 Leap Day Doodle sketches, like this one:
Google leap doodle sketch

Another draft was closer to the final Doodle, with a leaping frog jumping from one lily pad to the next.

google leap doodle sketch2

In the end, Hyuhn switched out the leaping frog with three bunnies, one marked with today’s date squeezing between the usual last day of February and first day of March.

Google doodle leap year 2016

In addition to being a leap year, Google notes 2016 is also special because it’s 11111100000 in binary.


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About the author

Amy Gesenhues
Contributor
Amy Gesenhues was a senior editor for Third Door Media, covering the latest news and updates for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. From 2009 to 2012, she was an award-winning syndicated columnist for a number of daily newspapers from New York to Texas. With more than ten years of marketing management experience, she has contributed to a variety of traditional and online publications, including MarketingProfs, SoftwareCEO, and Sales and Marketing Management Magazine. Read more of Amy's articles.

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