Science
Earth’s central axis changed: NASA says this giant hydroelectric power plant is the cause
The huge dam is said to have deviated the axis on which our planet spins and thus lengthened the days of the year.
In recent years, China has gone from being an emerging economy to a fully-fledged world power. Since 2014, its GDP has doubled and its annual economic growth was 5.2% in 2023, and in the first two quarters of this year its average growth has been 5%. With a gross domestic product of more than $16 billion, the Asian giant is positioned as one of the world’s largest powers, behind only the United States, which has a GDP of just over $25 billion. Although all forecasts indicate that China will occupy the top position in the ranking in the next decade.
China's growth over the past 40 years has been enormous, from being a predominantly agricultural country to becoming an industrial power. To achieve this development, Beijing knew that it had to, among other things, improve its infrastructure and in 1980 the Chinese government put on the table a project that had been conceived 50 years earlier but had not been executed due to lack of funds: to build a huge dam on the Yagntse River, the third largest river in the world in terms of flow and length.
A pharaonic construction.
Fourteen years passed between the time the Chinese Assembly submitted the project and the start of construction. In 1994, construction work officially began on the Three Gorges Dam, named after the three narrow valleys from which the Yangtze River flows: the Qutang, Wu and Xiling gorges.
18 years later, in 2012, the work was completely finished, although the hydroelectric plant had been generating energy at full capacity since 2009. It is more than two kilometres long and 185 metres high, making it the largest hydroelectric plant in the world and therefore the one that generates the most energy. With its 32 turbines it is capable of generating more than 80 billion kilowatt hours in a whole year, which is a milestone for renewable energy.
In addition to the complex power generation system, the dam has a system of locks to transport ships from one side of the river to the other, as this is one of the main river routes between the interior of China and the coast. In addition to the locks, which help overcome the 110-meter difference in altitude between one side of the river and the other, a boat lift has been built, capable of raising a 3,000-ton ship in less than an hour, while with the lock system the process takes about four hours.
39,300 cubic hectometres of water.
The dam's maximum capacity is 39 trillion litres of water and the channel extends 600 kilometres upwards. This amount of water has had enormous consequences for the landscape and the people living on the banks of the Yangtze and ultimately for the rotation of the earth.
According to a NASA study, this massive accumulation of water causes the length of days to lengthen by 0.06 microseconds, making the Earth flatter at the poles and slightly rounder at the equator. It also changes the position of the poles by 2 centimetres.
This was confirmed by the American space agency when analyzing the impact that such a strong change in mass would have at 175 meters above sea level. In other words, artificially bringing together 39,000 billion liters in a place where they would not naturally be affects the gravitational forces of the Earth and what is known as the ‘moment of inertia’, which corresponds to the inertia of an object with respect to its axis. Therefore, according to this law, the greater the distance of a mass from its axis of rotation, the slower it will rotate. In this case, since this alteration occurred at a height higher than sea level, the effect on the Earth's rotation is slightly greater, but still imperceptible.
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