Comments on: Planet Of The Dammed.

By: depth386

depth386 — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 04:33:46 +0000

The effect on rotation / length of day: I feel it must be insignificant compared to mountains and valleys (or oceans) which formed naturally.

By: Gap

Gap — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 20:12:28 +0000

I imagine some measurement scientists might be able to detect it somehow, and it could be of interest for ultraprecise measurements (I wonder if GPS can detect that kind of time difference?)

By: Hentzau

Hentzau — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 12:34:50 +0000

Any movement of mass around the Earth’s surface will have an effect on its rotation. You climbing a flight of stairs will slow its rotation infinitesimally. Melting icecaps and shifting glaciers will have a larger effect, but I doubt it would be significant on a human level.

By: Smurf

Smurf — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 15:43:51 +0000

“I’d be interested in knowing if this program went into detail at all rather than just blurting that out as a known fact”

No, they just blurted out the fact, went “Ooooo! Science!” and then moved on.

I’d forgotten that damming the rivers holds the water higher than it would be normally. I couldn’t work out how the same amount of mass could change something like that, but I totally forgot about height. Thanks for this.

Do melting icecaps have any sort of affect on this too? As in the mass moving away from the poles? I assume that the same things happened in the Ice Age when great sheets of ice were held up in the mountains too?