{"id":539733,"date":"2026-03-23T03:29:21","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T03:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/539733\/"},"modified":"2026-03-23T03:29:21","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T03:29:21","slug":"this-chinese-dam-is-so-big-it-altered-the-earths-rotation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/539733\/","title":{"rendered":"This Chinese Dam Is So Big It Altered The Earth’s Rotation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of humanity’s\u00a0long, slow slog through the ages, we’ve built some incredible structures, and\u00a0China in particular is not new to grand engineering feats. The Great Wall is\u00a0roughly 13,166 miles long,\u00a0constructed over the course of some 2,300 years\u00a0(from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD). While you can’t actually see it with the naked eye from space (there are, however, five things you can<\/a>),\u00a0its scale is still mightily impressive.<\/p>\n

Throughout the millennia, we’ve stored hundreds of billions of gallons of water behind thousands of dams around the globe.\u00a0That’s had a measurable effect on the position of Earth’s poles. And now it seems\u00a0the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric project on the Yangtze River in the Hubei province of China\u00a0is altering Earth’s rotation all on its own.<\/p>\n

With construction beginning\u00a0in 1994 and completing in 2006, the dam\u00a0contains around 44 billion tons of water,\u00a0the weight of which has shaved 0.06 microseconds off Earth’s rotation, according to NASA scientists.\u00a0Measuring 607 feet tall, it spans almost 1.5 miles across the Yangtze, and can generate 22,500 megawatts (three times more than the largest dam in the U.S., the Grand Coulee). Approximately 3.67 million people were relocated, and nearly 55 million were impacted because\u00a013 cities and over 1,300 villages were submerged,\u00a0along with untold archaeological sites and hazardous waste dumps.<\/p>\n

Read more: Here’s Who Really Owns All Of The Major Tool Brands<\/a><\/p>\n

Earth will keep on spinning\"Aerial<\/p>\n

Aerial satellite view of Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China. – Sentinel Hub\/Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

The Earth completes one revolution on its axis as it rotates around the Sun every 24 hours, but no two rotations (or two days for that matter) are ever really the same length. So, the 0.06 microseconds the dam is deducting is minimal compared to other natural one-time events. For instance,\u00a0the\u00a09.1 magnitude earthquake that struck off the coast of Japan in 2011 (causing the\u00a0Fukushima nuclear accident)\u00a0actually sped up its rotation by 1.8 millionths of a second.\u00a0And the\u00a0Sumatran earthquake in 2004 shifted enough of the Earth’s mass to shorten the length of a day by 2.68 microseconds.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Three Gorges Dam \u2014 the largest in the world \u2013\u00a0isn’t going anywhere, so it will\u00a0continue to alter the planet’s geophysics.\u00a0When water becomes concentrated in one area, Earth’s inertia changes, causing a very slight but measurable rotational slowdown. Much like a figure skater moving their arms in and out to control the speed of their spin.<\/p>\n

When massive volumes of water are displaced from one spot to another, the Earth’s shape actually changes, leading to what’s known as “true polar wander,”\u00a0a phenomenon that occurs because the Earth rotates to\u00a0redistribute mass and restabilize its spin. A report published in Geophysical Research Letters<\/a> states that all this damned up water has ever so slightly bumped the planet’s rotational axis by almost a meter over the last few decades.\u00a0If the Earth continues to slow down,\u00a0a shorter day several catastrophic events could occur<\/a>. Fortunately, we don’t need to worry about it for the foreseeable future, but it’s something we do need to keep an eye on.<\/p>\n

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Read the original article on SlashGear<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the course of humanity’s\u00a0long, slow slog through the ages, we’ve built some incredible structures, and\u00a0China in particular…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":539734,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[79,241664,90580],"class_list":["post-539733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-science","tag-three-gorges-dam","tag-yangtze-river"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=539733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/539734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=539733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=539733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=539733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}