NASA say huge man-made structure is actually slowing down Earth's rotation
With the ever-looming Doomsday Clock ticking down, it would be nice to have a little more time every year to get things done, even if most people would spend it staring at their phone.
While you might have thought that this was an impossibility, NASA have now discovered that a major landmark in China is so unbelievably huge that it's actually extended the length of the year by altering the rotation of our planet.
As reported by LADbible, Dr. Benjamin Fong Chao at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has revealed research that links the size and weight of the Three Gorges Dam in China to a change in the Earth's orbit.
Completed in 2012, the Three Gorges Dam stretches across the Yangtze River near Sandouping, and is the world's largest power station when considering its installed capacity.
It's also 2,335 meters wide and sits 185 meters above sea level at its peak, costing $20.4 billion in total by the end of its construction.
Due to its ability to hold roughly 40 cubic kilometers - equality to around 10 trillion gallons - of water, the Three Gorges Dam provides a shift in mass that increases the length of every single day on Earth by 0.06 microseconds, making our planet more round in the middle and flatter on top in addition.
Unfortunately, this extension of time isn't something that you would be able to feel in any capacity, as a single microsecond is the equivalent of 0.000001 seconds, so the amount that the Three Gorges Dam actually 'moved' time amounts to just 0.00000006 seconds.
For the Earth to move enough to create a single second of additional time, you'd need the equivalent shift in mass of 16,666,666 Three Gorges Dams, although that might scale a little differently if it all occurred at once!
Dr. Chao has further added that this movement "amounts to a bit more than 3 days over the entire age of the universe," so in the grand scheme of 13.8 billion years, it's not too much to worry about thankfully.
"Can we just take it all at once now in the form of an extra three-day weekend?" jokes one user in a Reddit thread following the news, with another adding that we "slowed down the earth before [we got] GTA 6."
It's certainly another hefty gut punch to any flat Earthers still persisting out there too, although you would have thought that clear evidence from some of the world's most knowledgable scientists would have been enough to convince them otherwise.
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