NASA asserts that China’s Megastructure has hidden power that can slow the Earth’s rotation with one shake.

In central China, the Yangtze River is blocked by an engineering marvel so great that it does nothing but power or flood control. It changes the body the rotation of the planet. The Three Gorges Damcompleted in 2012, it is over 2,300 meters long and 185 meters high.

Behind it is 40 cubic kilometers of water, about 10 billion liters. That water is stored 175 meters (574 feet) above sea level. That height news. Lifting such a high weight changes the way the Earth rotates.

The dam produces more than 80 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually and controls flooding along the Yangtze. It displaced more than a million people and changed the entire landscape environment. But the most unexpected effect of its construction has nothing to do with power or displacement. It has to do with planetary physics.

NASA Count, Not Warning

This issue dates back to a 2005 study by two geophysicists: Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Dr. Richard Gross to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They were studying 2004 Indian Ocean earthquakewhich is the fourth largest earthquake in a century. That earthquake was so powerful that it shortened the Earth’s day 2.68 microseconds and moved the reference number North by approx 2.5 centimeters in the direction of 145 degrees East Longitude.

Chao and Gross calculated that filling the Three Gorges Reservoir would lengthen the day by just 0.06 microseconds and change the water. number about 2 centimeters (0.8 inches). The earthquake also reduced the Earth’s curvature, the flattening of the poles and the curvature of the equator, to about 1 part in 10 billion. According to NASA

Planetary Physics

“Any global event involving mass movement affects the Earth’s rotation, from the seasons to driving a car,” Chao said in a 2005 paper. moment of inertia. A skater spins quickly by pulling the arms inward and slowly by extending them outward. The world works the same way.

As the mass moves away from the spin axis, the spin slows down. The Three Gorges Dam diverted 40 cubic kilometers of water from its natural reservoir to a reservoir 175 meters high. The redistribution of heavy it pulls the Earth’s rotation slightly. The effect is real but it disappears a little.

The month of gravity it slows the Earth’s rotation significantly, about 1.7 milliseconds per hundred, or about 17,000 times the annual effect of the dam. By comparison, the 2004 earthquake shortened the day by 2.68 microseconds, a change too small to detect with instruments but large enough to read. A reservoir change of 0.06 microsecond is even smaller.

Humans Continue to Change the Movement of the Planets

The dam is not the only human project to change the Earth’s rotation. Between 1993 and 2010, the removal of approx 2,150 gigatonnes of ground water moved the Earth’s spin pole 80 centimeters to the east. Climate change also plays a role. As the polar ice melts and water again spreads towards the equator, the Earth’s rotation slows down further.

Melting ice in Greenland and Antarctica is changing the way scientists can measure it. These changes, like the dam effect, are small but measurable. They add to the growing evidence that human activities now interact with planetary physics in ways previously unimaginable.

Some researchers are now discussing whether time-keeping systems may eventually require “skip the negative for a second“, a minute with only 59 seconds, to account for these incremental changes. That possibility is still far away. But it highlights how human activity meets the physics of the planet. Gross and Chao have been calculating the effects of earthquakes on the Earth’s rotation, gravity and the motion of the planet.

What The Pool Really Means

The real effects of the Three Gorges Dam are energy production, flood control, and environmental change. The dam’s effect on Earth’s rotation, while scientifically valid, is a footnote. Gross and Chao’s research shows that any mass movement, from earthquakes to seasonal weather, has some effect.

A reservoir change of 0.06 microsecond is too small to be detected with current equipment, although it can be counted. That is not a hidden weapon or a planetary disaster. It’s just proof that in this day and age engineering now it works on a scale that physicists have to account for. The same physics that explains a spinning man on a slippery slope also explains a spinning planet swept away by a pond.