NASA confirmed massive man-made project is slowing down Earth's rotation

Joe Harker
2026-03-20T20:17:22.644Z
News

It's actually altered the rotation speed of the Earth

NASA's instruments were able to confirm that a massive dam in China had actually affected the speed of the Earth's rotation.

China's Three Gorges Dam is a gargantuan energy-generating project which generates a huge amount of power, but perhaps more importantly than that it messes with the way the world moves.

Doctor Benjamin Fong Chao, geophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, has explained that the dam which stands at is 2,335 meters long and 185 meters high is making the days slightly longer.

The Three Gorges Dam is capable of holding 40 cubic kilometres of water, roughly equal to 10 trillion gallons, and the forces involved with moving and storing this incredible mass of water are what's caused the changes.

On the bright side, Dr Chao found that the impact on the Earth's rotation was very small as it only increased the length of a day on Earth by 0.06 microseconds.

Look at the size of that thing (CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images)

"For reference, this amounts to a bit more than 3 days over the entire age of the universe," Dr. Chao explains.

Basically, you're not going to notice the change in the Earth's rotation, nor that it has shifted the planet's axis by about two centimetres.

The dam is the world's largest hydroelectric power station and by doing its job shifting the distribution of the Earth's mass it has produced an alteration, as Dr Chao explained.

He said: "Any time you shift mass around, you change the Earth’s rotation. The effect is very small, but measurable."

It's a truly minuscule and almost imperceptible change in the way the world works, though modern instruments have been able to detect it.

The movement of such a mass of water changes the Earth's rotational speed slightly (CN-STR / AFP via Getty Images)

Fortunately it's not messing up anything on Earth and the dam produces enough power to match the energy output of 15 nuclear reactors, and in a world that desperately needs not to be choked to death by fossil fuels that's a good thing.

If you want to blame this giant man-made project for making you spend another 0.06 microseconds a day having to do things then you can, but you wouldn't even notice it.

There are plenty of other reasons why the Earth spins slightly differently at times.

On 5 August last year it was one of the shortest recorded days in history, and we're not talking about the amount of daylight during a 24 hour period.

Instead, the planet's daily rotation was 1.25 milliseconds faster than usual with scientists reckoning the reason for the change in speed was due to the Moon.