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.
=================================================================
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/
Dear FRiends,
We need your continuing support to keep FR funded. Your donations are our sole source of funding. No sugar daddies, no advertisers, no paid memberships, no commercial sales, no gimmicks, no tax subsidies. No spam, no pop-ups, no ad trackers.
If you enjoy using FR and agree it's a worthwhile endeavor, please consider making a contribution today:
Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
I’ve often wondered about the massive amounts of cargo being shipped all over the earth, super tankers, container ships and military ships of all seafaring nations. Thea must do something to the Earth’s wobble..............
All ships in the world collectively displace roughly 2.3 billion tons of water.
Despite the enormous total displacement, the effect on global sea levels is negligible. If all ships were removed from the oceans, the sea level would drop by only a few microns (millionths of a meter), far smaller than daily or seasonal fluctuations in sea level
aap.com.au
So China is bad for building big dams but they’re ok in the US? This is fake news.
How a giant reservoir can slow the planet’s spin In 2005,
Everything is interconnected, we are losing water supply while China is gaining water supply. Interesting.
Compared to the 156 Billion tons of water in 3 Gorges reservoir. (312 Trillion Lbs. +/-)
From AI:
“Overview of Three Gorges Dam and Lake Mead
Size and Capacity
Feature Three Gorges Dam Lake Mead Lake Powell
Type Gravity dam Reservoir Reservoir
Location Yangtze River, China Colorado River, USA Colorado River, USA
Height 607 feet (185 meters) 726.4 feet (221.4 meters) 770 feet (235 meters)
Capacity 39.3 million acre-feet 26.12 million acre-feet 24.322 million acre-feet
Power Generation
Three Gorges Dam: Generates 11 times more power than Lake Mead.
Lake Mead: Primarily serves as a water reservoir rather than a major power generation source.
Comparison of Functions
Purpose
Three Gorges Dam:
Flood control
Hydropower generation
Navigation improvement
Lake Mead:
Water supply for Las Vegas, Arizona, California, and Mexico
Recreation and tourism
Water Management
Three Gorges Dam:
Controls water flow in the Yangtze River, impacting downstream areas significantly.
Lake Mead:
Acts as a critical reservoir in the Colorado River system, balancing water storage and releases to meet demand.”
*** Everything is interconnected, we are losing water supply while China is gaining water supply. Interesting. ***
I think it’s from a 1950’s past time. Maybe some of those kids who were going to “dig a hole to China” actually succeeded, and the water’s been leaking out of American backyards ever since.
Did our parents come up with the “dig a hole to China” scam or was it our own idea?
How long is a microsecond? A thousandth of a second? A millionth of a second? Whatever it is, it’s 6 one- hundredths of that.
Seems strange that the water level on either side of the dam is about the same. When you compare it to the Hoover Dam or the Oroville Dam here in Northern Commiefornia in which there is drop of hundreds of feet. We live about 30 miles downstream from the Oroville Dam. If the river on the outlet side of the Dam ever got as high as the reservoir side, we’d be hundreds of feet under water.
Wait until Xi orders everyone to jump up and down all at once. We'll be done for, for sure.
Guam might actually tip over from the tidal waves!
-PJ
“Wait until Xi orders everyone to jump up and down all at once. We’ll be done for, for sure.”
Amusing. Less than half the weight of the water in 3 Gorges dispersed over an area thousands of times larger than the reservoir? Great Leftist education and logic! I guess you’ve “earned” your daily participation trophy! LMAO
Hmmm...
It occurs to me that the deep-impact bombing of Iran has many future unstated benefits...
😁.........................
No wonder I feel dizzy. /s
-PJ
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.