The Three Gorges Dam in China is so damn massive that it slowed the rotation of the Earth!

Image from external-preview.redd.it and submitted by mtimetraveller
image showing The Three Gorges Dam in China is so damn massive that it slowed the rotation of the Earth!

Ixuvia on July 28th, 2020 at 08:40 UTC »

Here is an article that explains this, for anyone who's curious.

Basically, the construction of the dam effectively redistributed trillions of kgs of water to a higher altitude. This increases the Earth's moment of inertia (a measure of how "difficult" it is to spin it, think of it as a rotational equivalent to mass), thereby slowing its rotation very slightly - the article quotes 0.06 milliseconds microseconds added to the length of the day, from a calculation by NASA. The concept is the same as a spinning ice skater tucking their arms in to speed up, or extending them to slow down.

EDIT: as a few people pointed out, it's 0.06 microseconds, not milliseconds... which, either way, definitely has no significant effects - regular tides, ocean currents and geological phenomena do much more than this all the time.

TrailerParkTonyStark on July 28th, 2020 at 08:43 UTC »

I have a question... Is this a God dam? M'heh heh heh heh

Deskbot on July 28th, 2020 at 09:24 UTC »

All dams will slow the earths rotation.