Posted on 08/11/2026 5:59:33 AM PDT by Red Badger
ne giant dam has already nudged the way our planet turns. When the enormous Three Gorges Dam reservoir in China filled with tens of billions of tons of water, NASA calculations showed that the extra mass made each day about 0.06 microseconds longer and shifted Earth’s rotation axis by roughly 2 centimeters.
Now Beijing is moving ahead with an even more ambitious project on the Tibetan Plateau. A new hydropower complex planned for Medog County in Tibet is expected to become the largest dam system on the planet, with an annual output roughly three times that of Three Gorges and a price tag of around 1.2 trillion yuan.
Chinese premier Li Qiang has already described it as a “project of the century” that could reshape global clean energy supply.
How a giant reservoir can slow the planet’s spin In 2005, scientists at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory modeled what would happen if the Three Gorges reservoir reached full capacity. Their conclusion was striking even if the numbers were small. The stored water would lengthen the day by about sixty billionths of a second and move the rotational pole by about two centimeters.
To explain it, NASA geophysicist Benjamin Fong Chao used a simple idea familiar from figure skating. When mass shifts farther from the spin axis, rotation slows slightly, just as a skater who extends their arms turns more slowly. “Any worldly event that involves the movement of mass affects the Earth’s rotation,” he said, noting that the effect from one dam is tiny but measurable with modern instruments.
Wide view of the Three Gorges Dam in China, the giant hydropower project often linked to discussions about how massive reservoirs can slightly affect Earth’s rotation.
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Inside the Medog megadam on the Yarlung Tsangpo The new complex, known as the Medog Hydropower Station, is being built on the lower reaches of the Yarlung Tsangpo River. Here the river drops about 2,000 meters in only 50 kilometers as it cuts through one of the deepest canyons on Earth, a natural staircase that engineers see as a vast source of energy.
Plans call for five hydropower stations in cascade, together generating about 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year, roughly triple the output of Three Gorges and similar to the annual power use of the United Kingdom.
That is enough to keep hundreds of millions of homes, factories, and data centers running, and to a large extent it could help China cut coal use and keep electric bills more predictable.
Could the Tibet project shift Earth’s rotation again So far, no detailed public study has estimated how much the Medog reservoirs might alter Earth’s spin. Scientists expect any change in day length to remain extremely small, because even a record breaking dam stores only a fraction of the planet’s total water. For most people, that means no noticeable difference in sunrise, sunset, or calendar time.
At the same time, researchers are paying closer attention to these subtle effects. A recent study from Harvard University showed that the combined water stored behind nearly seven thousand dams since the 19th century shifted the position of the North Pole by about a meter and slightly lowered global sea level.
The work, published with support from the American Geophysical Union, suggests that megaprojects like Medog are now part of the story of how Earth itself moves.
Rivers, neighbors, and a fragile mountain region Physics is only part of the debate. The Yarlung Tsangpo flows out of Tibet into India, where it is known as the Brahmaputra River, and then into Bangladesh. Farmers there depend on its waters for rice fields, drinking supplies, and existing hydropower, so any major upstream project naturally raises fears about droughts, floods, or changes in nutrient rich sediment.
Environmental groups also warn that the gorge sits in a seismically active, landslide prone region where storing such vast amounts of water could amplify risks. Beijing argues that the design will keep most of the flow moving through and that strict safeguards will protect ecosystems, while delivering clean power and jobs to a remote part of China.
At the end of the day, what the project is trying to do is balance climate goals, regional development, and cross border water politics, and that is a tough equation.
For the most part, the tug of an extra reservoir on Earth’s spin will stay in the realm of high-precision geodesy and satellite navigation, not everyday life. The bigger question is whether societies can agree on how to use rivers that now double as planetary-scale levers.
The main work on the rotational effects of the Three Gorges reservoir has been published in NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory news release.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-details-earthquake-effects-on-the-earth/
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“That is enough to keep hundreds of millions of homes, factories, and data centers running, and to a large extent it could help China cut coal use and keep electric bills more predictable.”
Have the Chinese communists give any reason to believe that they are concerned about closing any of their many, many coal-fired electricty generating plants?
If so, I missed it. I’m watching what they do and pay scant attention to what they say to the West.
OH the horror!!!
If they keep this up, it’ll result in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”!! >gasp<
When that dam fails bye bye China
The earth’s rotation was altered when fatboy JB Pritzker
tripped rushing to the free buffet line at a Dem meeting.
LOL
This is the variation in the length of day, since 1962, and the adoption of Atomic Time. (UTC was adopted in 1972.) The green line is a 365 day running average of the excess length of day, the daily variation indicated by the gray line. The red line is the cumulative excess since January 1, 1972. The vertical scales are different, and the green line, in milliseconds per day is the slope of the red line in total seconds, the integral of the green line since January 1, 1972. The vertical scale of the green line is on the left, in green, and the red line in red on the right. The gray and green lines have identical scales. I maintain that 60 nanseconds per day, on the gray line a displacement of 3 three ten-thousandths of the minor tick marks, is NOT measureable, but admittedly is calculable.
It’s not a massive individual dam, it’s a series of hydro power plants drilled into the sides of mountains with penstocks way up high that drop down to the turbines. That river has a very steep gradient they plan 5 underground turbine halls with diversionary structures into the penstock intakes. It’s basically a run of the river system but on a epic scale.
They import a lot of coal that’s a national security issue for them and also not anywhere as cheap as hydro power when you don’t have greens and unlimited labor force hydro is the cheapest form of bulk 24/7 power around.
The declination speed has increased since the Chinese built the 3 Gorges Dam creating a 312 Trillion Lbs. localized weight density on the surface of the planet. I’m sure this has nothing to do with climate change. (LOL) Thanks China!
Things that China makes tend to collapse,explode,implode and spontaneously combust with surprising regularity. I’ve read that if that Three Gorges Damn collapses something like a third of China’s population will be dead within hours.
How would they know? Did they measure before the project started and then measure again after it was finished? I call bullshit.
Exactly. Between that and the vagueness of their "calculations" ("about", "roughly"), the whole thing is laughable.
I heartily second your call of bulls***!
A slow down of 60 nanoseconds per day would mean that in a little more than 45,000 years the red line would be one minor tick (one second) higher than it would otherwise be. It has risen by 34 seconds since 1962. This means that that one damned dam will add a whopping 1.0 second to the 1,325,300 seconds of natural accumulated slow down! 15 sunsets forgone, lost forever! One every 3,000 years! Fifteen days of human history whipped from the calendar! Oh, Pope Gregory, where art thou!
Tastes like Chicken
OMG, we’re all gonna die!!!
Women and children most affected....
Bottom line: In 50,000 YEARS, our day will be 1 second longer.
I was gonna worry about snail slime making eagles impotent, but now I have something more important to worry about.
Again.......................
Again.......................
The Youtube click-baiters.
The calculation is actually very straightforward. The measurement dubious. One need only calculate the moment of interia of the water spread uniformly over the world’s oceans. Assuming a spherical shell is more than good enough for a couple of decimal places accuracy, but one can easily find displacement for the polar axis as a function of latitude and oceanic boundries therefrom and calculate the angulur inertia of the displaced mass. Repeat the calculation for the impounded mass of water, take the difference over the undisplaced moment and multiply by 86000 (24 x 60 x 60) seconds. They figure approximately a 0.00000000006944444444444% increase in the earth’s moment of inertia around the polar axis. IOW, a rainy day in Brazil.
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