If you’ve been blaming Monday for being especially long and Thursday for slipping away like a greased weasel, NASA says you might be onto something — but not in the way you think.
It turns out our species’ appetite for monument-making and “big solves” may have consequences so tiny they make a nanosecond look like a spectacle, and yet oddly poetic: mega-projects such as China’s Three Gorges Dam can measurably nudge the planet’s spin.
Yes, the same humans who can’t agree on a universal charging cable have engineered structures large enough to be felt — by very sensitive instruments — in the graceful, millennia-old wobble of planet Earth.
The Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam, fills a reservoir holding roughly 10.6 trillion gallons of water.
According to NASA scientists, when that amount of mass shifts location, the planet responds the way an ice skater responds when they tuck in their arms: the spin changes, ever so slightly.
How slight?
Try 0.06 microseconds.
That’s 0.00000006 seconds — a change small enough to annoy only the most obsessive chronometer collectors and the occasional satellite.
But measured is measured, and tiny, accumulated shifts matter when you’re thinking about climate models, geodesy, and the metaphysics of scheduling brunch!
“This underscores an important point,” said Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center: human activities, even those as mundane as driving, can affect Earth.
That’s not a call to hand in your car keys; it’s a reminder that mass redistribution — water, ice, concrete, and humanity’s stubborn will to build impressively — plays with planetary physics.
If you ever felt personally responsible for the state of the planet, congratulations: you were right, just on a microsecond scale!
A handful of headlines have gleefully declared that the Three Gorges Reservoir has “made days uneven,” as if the dam were a giant clock with mood swings.
That’s not entirely wrong — but it’s also not quite a reason to panic or to set your watch to “Three Gorges Standard Time.”
Earth’s rotation is influenced by many things: melting glaciers, earthquakes, seasonal winds, and yes, large reservoirs.
The dam’s impact is measurable, not catastrophic.
Still, this is an excellent plot twist for the modern age: the things we build to solve one problem (hydropower replacing some fossil fuels) can ripple through systems we rarely visualize.
Engineers love scalars and outputs; the planet prefers tensors and patient nudges.
Imagine explaining the carbon math to your grandmother while also adjusting for the infinitesimal change in the length of her afternoon nap.
At the more philosophical end of this story is a humble question: should humanity add planetary spin to the list of externalities for which we are accountable?
This may be an "overlooked" effect to our environmental and climate change theories.
If skyscrapers, dams, and reservoirs can change measurable geophysical parameters, our responsibility grows from "don’t trash the park" to "please don't reschedule the planet without an environmental impact statement."
There’s also the glorious absurdity of human ambition.
We erect towering skyscrapers and clock towers, dam rivers, and flatten mountains for minerals — then consult laser-precise instruments to see whether the globe twitched in response.
It’s both hubris and humility: hubris because we assume we can remodel the Earth to suit our needs, humility because the planet keeps reminding us how delicate its balances are.
What comes next?
More monitoring, for one.
More nuance in environmental planning.
And perhaps an expanded conversation about scale: we should celebrate impressive engineering while acknowledging its planetary footprint.
If a new dam, dam retrofit, or underground city can be linked to a measurable wobble, engineers and policymakers should fold that data into decisions rather than shrugging and hoping a supercomputer will forgive us!
So go ahead: keep your calendar app, keep your plans, enjoy the coffee that helps you get through timezones and microsecond variations....
But maybe — just maybe — let that morning cup come with a pinch of cosmic humility.
After all, the planet has been spinning for four and a half billion years without consulting us; we can at least try to be more thoughtful roommates!
How China’s Three Gorges Dam Is Slowing Down Earth's Rotation
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