So China’s ‘giant’ dam is affecting the rotation of the earth, know what is the reality

New Delhi : China has built the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in Hubei province. The dam was first proposed in 1919 by the interim first president of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, as a way to control flooding of the Yangtze River and to symbolize China’s power. However, the dam took decades to be built. Now that the dam is complete, many media reports are claiming that the dam affects the rotation of the Earth.

Is the Earth’s speed slowing down?

Now the question is, is it really changing the rotation of the Earth? According to media reports, this dam keeps water 175 meters above sea level. Its weight is more than 39 trillion kilograms. In such a situation, due to the moment of inertia, this heavy weight is affecting the rotation of the Earth. In simple words, the farther a body is from its axis, the greater is its moment of inertia, which in turn slows down the rotation speed.

What is moment of inertia?

What is Moment of Inertia? In fact, it is a quantity expressing the frequency of a body’s ability to resist angular acceleration, which is the sum of the product of the mass of each particle in the body and the square of its distance from the axis of rotation. The huge mass of water above sea level increases the moment of inertia of our Earth, but the change in its rotation is only 0.06 microseconds. That is, now our days are only 0.06 microseconds long, NDTV reported citing Medium.

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12 lakh people had left their homes

The dam has had some positive effects. It will help control floods and generate a lot of electricity. However, its construction forced 12 million people to relocate. The erosion of the reservoir has affected thousands of insect and fish species that live in its waters. In addition, the cost of building the dam is estimated to be $25 billion, with some estimates saying it could reach $37 billion.

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What are NASA scientists saying?

In conclusion, NASA scientists have found that the Earth’s rotation fluctuates occasionally due to events such as natural disasters and moon impacts. Therefore, the change caused by the dam is relatively insignificant in the larger scheme of things. However, we cannot ignore the fact that the Three Gorges Dam is the only man-made object to date that has the ability to single-handedly affect the Earth’s rotation.