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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The article lost me with the phrase “the extra mass made each day”.
Having a few gigantic dams that can be military targets is not a national security issue?
It’s the angular shift, not the speed of rotation that’s impacting climate/weather. The speed of rotation didn’t change North Atlantic weather patterns. Speed is a red herring.
Funny thing. I posted something on the same subject a few days ago and the only responses I got were about me not posting since just after 9-11-01. Just crickets.
As I understand current political/military actions, the area downstream (Arunachal Pradesh) is disputed between China and India. Now we know why.
Money, via resource control, as usual.
I didn’t know there were these gaps between the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau out of which rivers flowed, which vastly increases the watershed area. I saw that range as unbroken. I would think it seismically active because the Indian tectonic plate is still diving under Asia.
A minor detail.....................🙄
Hoover Dam Is Losing Power. Inside the ‘Slowest-Moving Train Wreck in History’ (FR link)
Isn't it interesting how China just seized and annexed all of Tibet in the 50s, speaking 3 U.N. resolutions, and the "colonizer" crowd just forgot about it? No protests. No "No dams on stolen land!" outrage. Crickets.
Polar wander is on the order of 3-10 meters off, to use Simon Newcombe’s choice phrase, the axis of figure. The poles “wobble”3 - 10 meters, almost entirely due to ocean and atmospheric currents. The “obliquity of the ecliptic”, axial tilt with respect to the orbital plane, is currently decreasing by an about ~ 0.43 arcseconds per year, causing the Tropics of Cancer and Capricon as well as the Artic and Antartic Circles to recede towards the equator and poles, respectively, by about 13.5 meters/year.
No worries at least for Vegas they only get 2% of the whole basin power budget from Hoover dam
Hoover Dam has a maximum nameplate capacity of 2,080 megawatts (MW) when Lake Mead is full. Due to historic drought and low water levels at Lake Mead, current operating capacity has dropped closer to 1,300 MW
Even at full cap it’s not much compared to what that valley users.
Vegas also has the 3rd straw aka the bathtub drain that sits 35 feet below the outlets of Hoover dam so they can never not have flows even if Hoover cannot let water out any that flows in Vegas can tap.
Flow Metrics in Acre-Feet per Year
Paleoclimate Low: ~3.96 MAF/year (reconstructed from tree rings, dating back centuries).
Instrumental Low: 5.44 MAF/year (the lowest recorded natural flow year in 1977).
Historical Low Estimate: 4.81 MAF/year (estimated for the exceptionally dry year of 1845).
Long-Term Average: ~14.6 to 14.8 MAF/year (the river’s typical natural unimpaired flow).
So the worst mega drought in the last 1200 years was 3.96 million acre feet per year Vegas uses under 300,000 they gonna be alright. In fact they would pass all of that and hold Lake Mead at 895 just at dead pool and Vegas still has 30 feet above it’s intake which sits 100 feet above the lake bed it’s a hollow steel cylinder you could send divers and cut additional intakes all the way down to 20 feet off the lake bed. Even then with 3+ million acre feet per year coming in it would never get that low. Again they would just open the lowest outlets and let the lake settle at 895 with free flow out and again Vegas has 30 feet of draw down.
We drilled into the bathtub drain for that specific reason so Vegas can never be dry. It’s the ace in the hole.
How China Is Building the Impossible $167B Dams that Triples Three Gorges Power (YouTube)
Yup—this is the usual scientific fraud = scientism.
We are living in a new Dark Ages where the high priests just make up stuff.
The Bible says that Earth doesn’t move. It’s strange how Christians pick and choose which parts of the Bible to believe.
“....together generating about 300 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year...”
In the first half of this year, coal-fired plants in China produced 2.5 trillion KWH.
China accounts for just over 50% of all coal-fired output of the world.
15 years or so ago, burning coal mines and seams in China produced as much CO2 as all the cars and trucks in the USA.
those fires never go out, and I’m sure there are many more now.
The whole climate change thing isn’t about the climate, it is about trying to get third-world countries level with the Western world in economics.
I think the people of Colombia would take issue with that statement..............
Yeah, whoever wrote the Psalms wasn’t much of a scientist. He has rivers clapping their hands and the hills singing in joy. That’s okay, I don’t understand modern poetry either.
Well, the CCP has to do something since 3Georges (yeah) is approaching collapse.
China has already altered the Earth’s rotation with a mega infrastructure project and is now planning a project that will triple the power of the Three Gorges Dam
The moon (high and low tide) probably alters the Earth's rotation a bit.
Supertankers?
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