{"id":30513,"date":"2026-07-28T06:50:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/nasa-s-geophysicist-calculated-one-dam\/30513\/"},"modified":"2026-07-28T06:50:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T10:50:00","slug":"nasa-s-geophysicist-calculated-one-dam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/nasa-s-geophysicist-calculated-one-dam\/30513\/","title":{"rendered":"NASA’s geophysicist calculated that one dam nudged Earth’s axis by 2 centimeters and added 0.06 microseconds to every day, and China just broke ground on one 3 times bigger"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a river in Tibet that drops 6,500 feet<\/strong> in just 31 miles.<\/p>\n

For decades, engineers looked at that canyon and imagined what it could do.<\/p>\n

Now they are building something there so enormous it makes the world’s current largest dam look modest.<\/p>\n

And the planet itself has a way of noticing when humans move this much water<\/strong> at once.<\/p>\n

A structure so heavy it rewrote the physics of a day<\/h2>\n

Picture a figure skater spinning in place.<\/p>\n

When she pulls her arms in tight, she spins faster.<\/p>\n

When she stretches them wide, she slows.<\/p>\n

Earth works by exactly the same rule, and any time enough mass shifts far enough from the planet’s axis, the spin changes too.<\/p>\n

Back in 2005, NASA scientist Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao<\/strong> calculated that concentrating a massive amount of water into one spot is enough to affect Earth’s rotation.<\/p>\n

His subject was a dam on the Yangtze River in central China.<\/p>\n

The numbers were almost impossible to believe.<\/p>\n

40 billion tons of water lifted into one place<\/h2>\n

Construction on the Three Gorges Dam began in 1994 and completed in 2006, holding around 44 billion tons<\/strong> of water.<\/p>\n

That is not a reservoir.<\/p>\n

That is an inland sea, perched higher above sea level than it ever was before.<\/p>\n

According to NASA scientists, that water shifted the distribution of Earth’s mass, increasing the planet’s moment of inertia, the same way a skater slows by stretching out her arms.<\/p>\n

The planet felt it the way a dancer feels a weight added to each wrist.<\/p>\n

That sensation, invisible to any human, was detectable by instruments<\/strong> designed to track the spin of the whole Earth.<\/p>\n

Research published in Geophysical Research Letters suggests the cumulative effect of thousands of dams worldwide has nudged Earth’s rotational axis by nearly a meter over recent decades.<\/p>\n

Each of those dams, individually, seemed like a local engineering decision.<\/p>\n

The number that stops people cold<\/h2>\n

The effect was tiny, but it was real and it was measurable.<\/p>\n

Chao calculated that, when full, the dam could increase the length of the day by 0.06 microseconds<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

That amounts to a bit more than three days over the entire age of the universe.<\/p>\n

And yet the axis moved.<\/p>\n

Chao and Gross calculated that filling the Three Gorges reservoir would shift the pole by about 2 centimeters.<\/p>\n

Two centimeters does not sound like much until you realize the thing that moved it was standing water<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Not an earthquake.<\/p>\n

Not a volcanic eruption.<\/p>\n

A dam that humans planned, built, and filled on a stretch of river in central China.<\/p>\n

The idea that still water could tug the planet’s spin is the kind of thing that takes a moment to fully land.<\/p>\n

Now China has broken ground on something three times larger<\/h2>\n

In July 2025, heavy machinery arrived at the edge of a remote Himalayan canyon in southeastern Tibet.<\/p>\n

Chinese Premier Li Qiang announced the start of construction on what will be the world’s largest hydropower dam, estimated to cost around $170 billion<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A section of the Yarlung Zangbo falls 6,561 feet within just 31 miles, offering extraordinary hydropower potential.<\/p>\n

The gorge is so steep that the river roars through it like water forced through a cracked pipe.<\/p>\n

The new dam’s projected annual capacity of 300 billion kWh is equivalent to Britain’s entire power consumption in 2024, and nearly triple<\/strong> the output of Three Gorges.<\/p>\n

For the engineers<\/a> working in that canyon, it is one of the most powerful hydropower sites ever attempted.<\/p>\n

You can read the full Newsweek report<\/a>, which used satellite imagery to confirm the exact construction site.<\/p>\n

What a planet does when the weight keeps shifting<\/h2>\n

The Three Gorges Dam generates 22,500 megawatts, already three times more than the largest dam in the United States, the Grand Coulee.<\/p>\n

The new Tibetan project is designed to generate power on a scale that dwarfs even that.<\/p>\n

The ecological stakes are just as striking.<\/p>\n

The Yarlung Zangbo becomes the Brahmaputra as it flows south into India and Bangladesh, and millions of people depend on that flow staying predictable.<\/p>\n

Scientists studying river ecosystems<\/a> under pressure know how quickly a disrupted waterway reshapes the living world around it.<\/p>\n

Fish migration routes, sediment cycles and seasonal flood plains can all shift when a river’s rhythm is rewritten upstream.<\/p>\n

Downstream farmers who time their planting to the river’s seasonal pulse could find that pulse arriving weeks earlier or later than it ever has before.<\/p>\n

Whether a structure three times the scale of Three Gorges will nudge the planet’s spin further is a question physicists have not yet publicly answered.<\/p>\n

What Three Gorges already proved is that human engineering<\/strong> and planetary physics are no longer separate conversations.<\/p>\n

And in a Himalayan canyon right now, that conversation is just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a river in Tibet that drops 6,500 feet in just 31 miles. For decades, engineers looked at that canyon and imagined what it could do. Now they are building something there so enormous it makes the world’s current largest dam look modest. And the planet itself has a way of noticing when humans … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":30512,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rank_math_focus_keyword":"nasa s geophysicist","rank_math_title":"NASA's geophysicist calculated that one dam nudged Earth's axis by 2 centimeters and added 0.06 microseconds to every day, and China just broke ground on one 3 times bigger","rank_math_description":"China's Three Gorges Dam shifted Earth's axis and slowed its spin. Now China just broke ground on a mega dam three times more powerful in the Himalayas.","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30513","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30513"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30513\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoportal.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}