Table of Contents
CHINESE DAM : SLOWS DOWN EARTH’S ROTATION
HISTORY
- Sun Yat-sen (father of modern China) originally proposed the idea of the Three Gorges Dam all the way back in early 1919
- In an article titled, “A Plan to Development Industry”, Sun Yat-Sen proposed the idea of constructing a dam that not only would help control the flooding of the Yangtze River, but also embody China’s “new might.”
Three Gorges Is Massive
- Made of steel and concrete, the steel dam is 7,661 feet long, almost 600 feet high.
- Engineers needed 510,000 tons of steel to construct the massive dam.
- To put that in perspective, with the same resources one could build 60 different Eiffel Towers.
3 Major Purposes
- Flood Control
- Hydroelectric Power Production
- Navigation Improvement
Power Hungry
- Hydro Project
- The Three Gorges Dam provides energy to millions of people using 34 massive
- That would be like a power plant burning through 25 million tons of crude oil or 50 million tons of coal.
- The Three Gorges Project
- Took Decades to Become a Reality
- After Sun Yat-Sen proposed the creation in 1919, the Three Gorges Dam was not discussed until 1944 into 1946.
- The Republic of China signed a contract with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to design the dam in
- This project was quickly abandoned due to the Chinese civil war that followed World War II
- The first day of construction on the Three Gorges Dam did not officially begin until December 14, 1994, with it being in operation by 2009.
- There are consistent adjustments to the dam being made every so often to this day.
- Three Gorges Was Delayed Since the Beginning
- Since the Three Gorges Dam was announced in 1994, the project was writhed in controversy and delays.
- The project was originally slated to complete in 2008 but spiraling costs (total cost of the dam have ranged everywhere from$25 billion and have soared as high as $37 billion by some counts), environmental concern, Chinese political corruption, and resettlement issues caused the project’s progress to slow and at times halt, causing more bad than good for locals.
Water Pollution
- Estimates state that 70%of China’s freshwater is polluted and the dam could be making it a lot worse
- The dam sits on top of old waste facilities and mining operation. 265 million gallonsof raw sewage is deposited in the Yangtze River each year.
Massive Migration
- 2 million people were forced to relocate
Better Flood Control
- Seasonal flooding of the Yangtze River has been a major cause for concern for the people afflicted by the natural disaster for countless years.
- The Yangtze River is the third longest river in the world, snaking 6,357 km across Asia.
- The Three Gorges problem helps keep the river at bay during the flooding season, helping protect millions of homes and lives downstream as well as important cities that sit adjacent to the Yangtze like, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shanghai.
- The reservoir that has been created by the dam measures 405 square miles in area.
Power Generation
- The Three Gorges dam generates 11 times more power than the also massive Hoover Dam, as the world’s largest power station coming in at 22,500 MW.
- The amount of energy that is generated is so massive, the Three Gorges dam is said to largely support the entire nation of China
The Negative Environmental Impact
- In the region surrounding the Three Gorges Dam, you will find it is the home to 6,400 plant species, 3,400 insect species, 300 fish species, and more than 500 terrestrial vertebrate species.
- Erosion of the reservoir has triggered landslides and has even threatened one of the world’s biggest fisheries in the East China Sea.
- The dam is so massive that it has created a microclimate that has threatened the ecosystem of the region.
It Has Slowed the Rotation of the Earth
- This rotation of Earth is actually slowed down quite often due to other factors such as the moon’s position, earthquakes, and even recently proven climate change.
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