Science & Technology

Huge man-made structure has altered the rotation of the Earth

By T.K. Randall
May 2, 2025 ·  3 comments

The Three Gorges Dam. Image Credit: CC BY 2.0 Rehman / Wiki Measuring 185 meters in height and 2,309 meters in width, China's Three Gorges Dam is the world's largest power station and produces more energy than 15 nuclear reactors.

Completed back in 2006, the damn spans the width of the Yangtze River and has been hailed as a major achievement - not only due to its immense scale - but due to the fact that it produces next to no greenhouse gas emissions.

But there is another, less obvious accolade that the dam is known for - one that impacts every country and every living thing on the plant, even though nobody is actually aware of it.

Due to its immense size and the huge mass of water that it holds back, the dam has actually impacted the Earth's rotation - slowing it down by a tiny, imperceptible fraction.This also means that it has increased the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds.

"For reference, this amounts to a bit more than 3 days over the entire age of the universe," said Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao - a geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

"Any time you shift mass around, you change the Earth's rotation."

"The effect is very small, but measurable."

Source: Lad Bible | Comments (3)

Tags: Earth