Original photo by Stan/ Adobe Stock
While there are a few human-made objects visible from space, there’s only one known example constructed by beavers: the world’s largest beaver dam, located in the Peace-Athabasca Delta of Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park. You can’t see it from space with the naked eye, but the dam was discovered on October 2, 2007, using satellite imagery provided by Google Earth. It appears to have been built during the last five decades, as photographs taken of the same location in 1975 show limited beaver activity.
Estimates put the length of the dam at more than 2,600 feet, and based on satellite imagery, it’s been measured to cover an approximate surface area of roughly 750,000 square feet. The pond created by the dam is estimated to hold nearly 2.5 million cubic feet of water. To use an analogy Canadians would surely approve of, that’s roughly the same amount of water needed to fill 1,600 standard ice hockey rinks.
Oops, incorrect!
It's a factThe Hoover Dam got its name in 1930, but it didn’t sit well with Franklin D. Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover’s rival and successor. At the dam’s 1935 dedication, Roosevelt referred to it as the Boulder Dam. That name stuck until after FDR’s death in 1945.
Given its remote location miles from any paved road or trail, accessing the dam requires a multiday trek through wetlands and forest. That inaccessibility poses such a challenge that only one known individual has ever visited the dam itself. In July 2014, adventurer Rob Mark completed the perilous trek, snapping a celebratory selfie with the beaver lodge behind him. Upon his arrival, he noted how difficult it is to grasp the dam’s enormity from up close, and how its sheer size is better appreciated with the photographs taken from space.
Numbers Don't Lie
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Beavers are the second-largest rodents, behind ______.
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Beavers are the second-largest rodents, behind capybaras.
China’s Three Gorges Dam slowed the Earth’s rotation.
Depending on their enormity, it’s possible for massive infrastructure projects to impact the Earth’s rotation. One such example is China’s Three Gorges Dam, which measures 600 feet tall and 7,500 feet long and spans the Yangtze River. When filled, the dam’s reservoir is able to hold 10 trillion gallons of water.
In 2005, NASA scientist Benjamin Fong Chao calculated that a completely filled reservoir would slow the Earth’s spin, increasing the length of each day by 0.06 microseconds (or 60 billionths of a second). This is caused by the redistribution of mass away from the center of Earth’s rotation, which makes the planet twirl less fluidly. As water is raised higher above sea level, it impacts the Earth’s moment of inertia and causes the planet’s rotation to slow.
Bennett Kleinman is a New York City-based staff writer for Inbox Studio, and previously contributed to television programs such as "Late Show With David Letterman" and "Impractical Jokers." Bennett is also a devoted New York Yankees and New Jersey Devils fan, and thinks plain seltzer is the best drink ever invented.
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