Three Gorges Dam of China is the worlds largest hydropower project. The dam is built on Yangtze River ( Chang Jiang ). Yangtze River is the longest river of Asia and 3rd longest river in world.
Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao, a NASA scientist, calculated that China's massive Three Gorges Dam has had a measurable impact on Earth's rotation and rotational axis. According to his calculations, the dam could shift Earth's rotational axis by approximately 2 centimeters and increase the length of a day by about 0.06 microseconds (60 billionths of a second).
How Does This Happen?
Filling the Three Gorges Reservoir involves storing approximately 40 billion tons (40 cubic kilometers) of water at an elevation of around 175 meters above sea level.
This enormous redistribution of mass changes Earth's moment of inertia, subtly affecting its rotation. The principle is similar to a spinning figure skater extending their arms: as their mass spreads farther from the axis of rotation, their spinning speed decreases.
In the same way, concentrating such a massive volume of water in an elevated reservoir slightly slows Earth's rotation, extending the length of a day by approximately 0.06 microseconds. The redistribution also causes a small shift in the planet's rotational axis, estimated at around 2 centimeters.
Although these changes are far too small to notice in everyday life, they demonstrate something remarkable: human engineering projects can have measurable effects on a planetary scale.
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NASA article about this
