THREE GORGES DAM
The Three Gorges Dam is a hydroelectric gravity dam that spans the Yangtze River by the town of Sandouping, in Yiling District, Yichang, Hubei province, central China, downstream of the Three Gorges. When construction of the dam officially began in 1994, it was the largest engineering project in China. The Three Gorges Dam has been the world’s largest power station in terms of installed capacity (22,500 MW) since 2012.
THREE GORGES DAM
This MEGA-PROJECT came with its own cost and that cost was something which Earth had to pay by altering its rotation speed. By saying the rotation of the earth you can get a speck of the bulkiness of this mega structure and the pinnacle of human engineering skills. When the Three Gorges Dam was built, 39 trillion kilograms of water from the Yangtze River was held up behind it raised to 175 meters above sea level. This altered the Earth’s moment of inertia changed ever so slightly, causing the rotation to move more slowly. This is the same principle behind why figure skaters tuck in their arms to spin faster.
NASA has calculated that the dam only slows the rotation by 0.06 microseconds, which is six-hundredths of a millionth of a second. Our planet’s rotation speed actually fluctuates fairly often, as it can be influenced by earthquakes, the moon, and the climate change-induced movement of the North Pole.
The Analytics Society 