Three Gorges Dam: how your days became literally longer

The title is not click-bait. Our days have actually gotten longer, as per NASA scientists, by 0.06 microseconds.  The reason? Engineers in China. The Three Gorges Dam is located on the Yangtze River in China and it is one engineering marvel just for its scale. The idea was first initiated by Sun Yat-sen in the early 20th century, but the basic planning itself only started in the 1980s. The government finally approved and agreed to fund the project in 1992, and construction began in 1994. The dam took a whole 18 years to mature (no pun intended), completing in 2012. Building the dam required monumental efforts: about 27 million cubic meters of concrete and 463,000 metric tons of steel. 463,000 metric tons is about 92,600 elephants and 27 million cubic metres of concrete is about 10,800 olympic-sized swimming pools. If that’s not enough, they had to relocate 1.2 million people as they were in high-risk flooding areas. Thanks to all that efforts, the dam now stands 2 km in length and 185 meters in height, and has a capacity of 22,500 megawatts of electricity. Now, why is this beast causing the earth to slow down?

Well, the Three Gorges Dam is so massive that it can hold 39 trillion kilograms (39 billion tons). This causes a huge problem; this huge mass stored in one place redistributes the Earth’s mass, creating an imbalance. Think of it like this. A figure skater is skating with his arms close to his body and he’s spinning, and then he extends his arms, and he slows down. The reason is mass redistribution, and that is exactly what has happened with this dam. While this looks like a minor and almost intangible issue to our daily lives, the realization that humans can actually slow the earth down is terrifying. If you’ve read my post of Gravity, you will know the earth is orbiting the Sun and not falling into it because of its speed at which its moving and its inertia, and slowing the earth down could prove to be catastrophic.