Earth’s Rotation Is Slowing Down And NASA Says a Massive Dam in China Is to Blame

Snaking for nearly 4,000 miles, the waters of China’s Yangtze River are unfathomable, untamed. In the past, these waters have unleashed some of the greatest catastrophes upon the population living nearby. At that time, there was no wall to contain or hold these mighty waters. But today, protruding in the Hubei province is the muscular Three Gorges Dam. Each time it rains too heavily, the dam bursts open its floodgates and cradles the wellspring of water within its mammoth reservoir, opening again when the river bed is too dry.

For years, since 2006, the ferocious structure has bridled and restrained the flow of these waters, also generating enormous amounts of electric power for the neighbouring inhabitants. NASA, however, is not too happy with this gigantic reservoir. NASA has accused the Chinese government that their dam has slowed down the Earth’s rotation and increased the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds.

The beast, Three Gorges, towers deep inside China’s rural heartland, 400 miles upstream along the third-longest river in the world. The dam is clearly visible to the naked eye from space, as NASA’s Landsat satellite also recorded. The dam stretches for thousands of miles across China before winding up its mouth near Shanghai. Sloshing within the belly of this dam is a magnanimous reservoir, almost 1.5 miles long and 600 feet tall, extending upstream from the dam 370 miles. In an earlier article published by Business Insider, the enormous capacity of this reservoir makes it a weighty burden on the planet, which, ultimately, ends up slowing down Earth’s rotation.

Called “moment of inertia,” this phenomenon deals with the inertia of a rigid rotating body with respect to its rotation. Since the reservoir can hold up to 42 billion tons of water, a shift in a mass of that size will impact the rotation of the Earth. The moment of inertia of an object about a given axis “describes how difficult it is to change its angular motion about that axis. The longer the distance of a mass to its axis of rotation, the slower it will spin,” describes Insider.

To picture it in examples of everyday life, you can imagine “a figure skater attempting to spin faster will draw her arms tight to her body, and thereby reduce her moment of inertia. Similarly, a diver attempting to somersault faster will bring his body into a tucked position.”

In conversation with Snopes, NASA scientists added to the explanation by saying, “If filled, the gorge would hold 10 trillion gallons of water. That shift of mass would increase the length of day by only 0.06 microseconds and make the Earth only very slightly more round in the middle and flat on the top. It would shift the pole position by about 0.8 inch.” If the dam continues to exist and if the planet’s rotation continues to slow down, who knows, you may have to take a larger-sized page to plan your daily time management.