NASA confirm China's Three Gorges Dam could make every day longer as it makes irreversible changes to Earth
As the world continues to advance at an alarming pace, it seems that architects really are going with the idea that bigger is better.
Alongside ancient ones like the Great Wall of China, the likes of Beijing Daxing International Airport, the Burj Khalifa, and the International Space Station (even though it's not actually on Earth) are classed as some of the world's biggest megastructures.
China's Three Gorges Dam is another colossus of the building world, and while China has plans to build a giant power station the size of it in space, it's currently a jewel in the country's energy production crown.
Alongside a new dam that's three times the size of the Three Gorges Dam being approved for construction on China's Yarlung Tsangpo River, NASA is looking at what these megastructures could be doing to our planet.
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Serving as the world's largest power station, the Three Gorges Dam towers 175 meters above sea level in the far west of Wuhan.
Packing a punch with a reservoir flood storage capacity of 22 km3, this has come at the cost of 13 flooded cities, 140 towns, and the displacement of over 31 million people.
Despite the Three Gorges Dam coming at a whopping cost of ¥203 billion ($31.765 billion), the fact that it can produce 0.54 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity every day and power 5.4 million households for a whole month when at full capacity means many think it's well worth it.
According to Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, a geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the Three Gorges Dam is having an adverse effect on the planet's rotation.
When filled with 10 trillion gallons of water, the world's largest hydroelectric dam can increase the length of a day by 0.06 microseconds.
Over on Reddit, one person fumed: "F**king corporations. They'll do anything to get me to work a little longer."
Another grumbled: "I knew my work day felt longer - f**kers"
A third said: "Bro, 24hrs was long enough."
It's all to do with the moment of inertia, which is how the distribution of mass affects a body's rotating speed. By moving around such a large amount of water, the Three Gorges has very subtly affected Earth's mass distribution, and in turn, its rotation.
For example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami forced a massive shift in the Earth's tectonic plates and shortened the length of a day by 2.68 microseconds.
It's also said that the Three Gorges is able to make the Earth slightly flatter on the top by shifting the North and South Poles by two centimeters (0.8 inch).
Elsewhere, research from Nature's "Contributions of core, mantle and climatological processes to Earth’s polar motion" looked at 120 years of data and suggested that climate change has forced our days to get longer by 1.33 milliseconds per 100 years since 2000.
As for the Three Gorges, the fact that 0.06 microseconds works out at just over three days over the entire age of the universe, we don't have much to be worried about.
Okay, so we won't be chained to our desks for even longer as the working week gets extended by a day every year. Phew.