Whoopsie, Humans Built So Many Dams That We Shifted the North Pole by 3 Feet
Humanity's impact on the planet is so immense that our engineered megastructures have altered the very rotation of the planet.
A new study from Harvard University analyzes how dam building—primarily the two stages that spanned from 1835 to 2011—has caused the Earth's poles to move roughly three feet.
In addition to changing the Earth's rotation, dams have caused a global decrease in water levels.
Dams have long been one of humanity's greatest tools for controlling the world's water. The very first dams, constructed in ancient Mesopotamia, were used for many of the same purposes as they are today: water irrigation and flood control (though, a few centuries later, we now also use them to generate hydropower). But as the era of big dams truly got underway in the 19th and 20th centuries, we've also begun to learn about the unintended consequences of these dams. They drastically disturb natural ecosystems, negatively impact water quality, and exacerbate soil erosion—oh, and they've also altered the location of the Earth's poles.
In a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists at Harvard University details their discovery that the rampant construction of dams from 1835 to 2011 has locked up so much water that the Earth's poles have moved slightly from their axial rotation. Because Earth's outermost layer rests upon another layer of liquid rock, a redistribution of mass on the surface—whether accomplished by glaciers during an ice age or by locking up water behind dams—it can influence the orientation of the Earth's poles. The authors describe the phenomenon like slapping a lump of clay on a basketball and spinning it. In an effort to maintain momentum, the ball adorned with clay will shift slightly toward the equator, which eventually impacts the poles in a process known as 'true polar wander.'
Thankfully, Earth is not destined to end up like the planet Uranus, forever spinning on its side. Two centuries of frantic dam-building (about 7,000 of them in total) has only nudged the poles about three feet and caused a 0.83-inch drop in global sea levels.
'As we trap water behind dams, not only does it remove water from the oceans, thus leading to a global sea level fall, it also distributes mass in a different way around the world,' Harvard University graduate student Natasha Valencic, the lead author of the study, said in a press statement. 'We're not going to drop into a new ice age, because the pole moved by about a meter [or about three feet] in total, but it does have implications for sea level.'
Interestingly, the movement of the poles also matches the history of industrialization. Between 1835 and 1954, a majority of dams were constructed in North America and Europe, moving the North Pole 8 inches to the 103rd meridian east. Once East Africa and Asia began constructing dams in the latter half of the 20th century, the poles moved once again—this time 22 inches toward the 117th meridian west, according to the authors.
The most eye-popping example of dams' astronomical impact can be seen by analyzing the effects of China's Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam in the world. In 2005, NASA scientist Benjamin Fong Chao showed that when full, this mega-dam alone slowed the rotation of the Earth by 0.06 microseconds, or 60 billionths of a second.
Dams aren't the only anthropomorphic force at work impacting the orientation of the Earth's poles, however. A 2023 study analyzed the impact of pumping groundwater from reservoirs, and estimated that between 1993 and 2010, net water loss amounted to roughly 2 trillion tons and caused a 4.36 centimeter shift every year.
Humanity continues to impact our planet in a myriad of complex ways. Hopefully, the more we learn about these impacts, the more we can mitigate any negative impacts they may bring along with them.
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WIRED
28 minutes ago
- WIRED
At Least 750 US Hospitals Faced Disruptions During Last Year's CrowdStrike Outage, Study Finds
Jul 19, 2025 11:54 AM Of those, more than 200 appear to have had outages of services related to patient care following CrowdStrike's disastrous crash, researchers have revealed. Photograph:When, one year ago today, a buggy update to software sold by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike took down millions of computers around the world and sent them into a death spiral of repeated reboots, the global cost of all those crashed machines was equivalent to one of the worst cyberattacks in history. Some of the various estimates of the total damage worldwide have stretched well into the billions of dollars. Now a new study by a team of medical cybersecurity researchers has taken the first steps toward quantifying the cost of CrowdStrike's disaster not in dollars, but in potential harm to hospitals and their patients across the US. It reveals evidence that hundreds of those hospitals' services were disrupted during the outage, and raises concerns about potentially grave effects to patients' health and well-being. Researchers from the University of California San Diego today marked the one-year anniversary of CrowdStrike's catastrophe by releasing a paper in JAMA Network Open, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, that attempts for the first time to create a rough estimate of the number of hospitals whose networks were affected by that IT meltdown on July 19, 2024, as well as which services on those networks appeared to have been disrupted. A chart showing a massive spike in detected medical service outages on the day of CrowdStrike's crashes. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open By scanning internet-exposed parts of hospital networks before, during, and after the crisis, they detected that at minimum 759 hospitals in the US appear to have experienced network disruption of some kind on that day. They found that more than 200 of those hospitals seemed to have been hit specifically with outages that directly affected patients, from inaccessible health records and test scans to fetal monitoring systems that went offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks they were able to scan, the researchers detected that fully 34 percent of them appear to have suffered from some type of disruption. All of that indicates the CrowdStrike outage could have been a 'significant public health issue,' argues Christian Dameff, a UCSD emergency medicine doctor and cybersecurity researcher, and one of the paper's authors. 'If we had had this paper's data a year ago when this happened," he adds, 'I think we would have been much more concerned about how much impact it really had on US health care.' CrowdStrike, in a statement to WIRED, strongly criticized the UCSD study and JAMA's decision to publish it, calling the paper 'junk science.' They note that the researchers didn't verify that the disrupted networks ran Windows or CrowdStrike software, and point out that Microsoft's cloud service Azure experienced a major outage on the same day, which may have been responsible for some of the hospital network disruptions. 'Drawing conclusions about downtime and patient impact without verifying the findings with any of the hospitals mentioned is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible,' the statement reads. 'While we reject the methodology and conclusions of this report, we recognize the impact the incident had a year ago,' the statement adds. 'As we've said from the start, we sincerely apologize to our customers and those affected and continue to focus on strengthening the resilience of our platform and the industry.' In response to CrowdStrike's criticisms, the UCSD researchers say they stand by their findings. The Azure outage that CrowdStrike noted, they point out, began the previous night and affected mostly the central US, while the outages they measured began at roughly midnight US east coast time on July 19—about the time when CrowdStrike's faulty update began crashing computers—and affected the entire country. (Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 'We are unaware of any other hypothesis that would explain such simultaneous geographically-distributed service outages inside hospital networks such as we see here' other than CrowdStrike's crash, writes UCSD computer science professor Stefan Savage, one of the paper's co-authors, in an email to WIRED. (JAMA declined to comment in response to CrowdStrike's criticisms.) In fact, the researchers describe their count of detected hospital disruptions as only a minimum estimate, not a measure of the real blast radius of CrowdStrike's crashes. That's in part because the researchers were only able to scan roughly a third of America's 6,000-plus hospitals, which would suggest that the true number of medical facilities affected may have been several times higher. The UCSD researchers' findings stemmed from a larger internet-scanning project they call Ransomwhere?, funded by the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health and launched in early 2024 with the intention of detecting hospitals' ransomware outages. As a result of that project, they were already probing US hospitals using the scanning tools ZMap and Censys when CrowdStrike's July 2024 calamity struck. For the 759 hospitals in which the researchers detected that a service was knocked offline on July 19, their scans also allowed them to analyze which specific services appeared to be down, using publicly available tools like Censys and the Lantern Project to identify different medical services, as well as manually checking some web-based services they could visit. They found that 202 hospitals experienced outages of services directly related to patients. Those services included staff portals used to view patient health records, fetal monitoring systems, tools for remote monitoring of patient care, secure document transfer systems that allow patients to be transferred to another hospital, 'pre-hospital' information systems like the tools that can share initial test results from an ambulance to an emergency room for patients requiring time-critical treatments, and the image storage and retrieval systems that are used to make scan results available to doctors and patients. 'If a patient was having a stroke and the radiologist needed to look at a scan image quickly, it would be much harder to get it from the CT scanner to the radiologist to read,' Dameff offers as one hypothetical example. The researchers also found that 212 hospitals had outages of 'operationally relevant' systems like staff scheduling platforms, bill payment systems, and tools for managing patient wait times. In another category of 'research relevant' services, the study found that 62 hospitals faced outages. The biggest fraction of outages in the researchers' findings was an 'other' category that included offline services that the researchers couldn't fully identify in their scans at 287 hospitals, suggesting that some of those, too, might have been uncounted patient-relevant services. 'Nothing in this paper says that someone's stroke got misdiagnosed or there was a delay in the care of someone getting life-saving antibiotics, for instance. But there might have been,' says Dameff. 'I think there's a lot of evidence of these types of disruptions. It would be hard to argue that people weren't impacted at a potentially pretty significant level.' The study's findings give a sprawling new sense of scope to anecdotal reports of how CrowdStrike's outage affected medical facilities that already surfaced over the last year. WIRED reported at the time that Baylor hospital network, a major nonprofit health care system, and Quest Diagnostics were both unable to process routine bloodwork. The Boston-area hospital system Mass General Brigham reportedly had to bring 45,000 of its PCs back online, each of which required a manual fix that took 15 to 20 minutes. In their study, researchers also tried to roughly measure the length of downtime of the hospital services affected by the CrowdStrike outage, and found that most recovered relatively quickly: About 58 percent of the hospital services were back online within six hours, and only 8 percent or so took more than 48 hours to recover. That's a far shorter disruption than the outages from actual cyberattacks that have hit hospitals, the researchers note: Mass-spreading malware attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry in 2017 as well as the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that struck the payment provider subsidiary of United Healthcare in early 2024 all shut down scores of hospitals across the US—or in the case of WannaCry, the United Kingdom—for days or weeks in some cases. But the effects of the CrowdStrike debacle nonetheless deserve to be compared to those intentionally inflicted digital disasters for hospitals, the researchers argue. 'The duration of the downtimes is different, but the breadth, the number of hospitals affected across the entire country, the scale, the potential intensity of the disruption is similar,' says Jeffrey Tully, a pediatrician, anesthesiologist, and cybersecurity researcher who coauthored the study. A map showing the duration of the apparent downtime of detected medical service outages in hospitals across the US. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open A delay of hours, or even minutes, can increase mortality rates for heart attack and stroke patients, says Josh Corman, a cybersecurity researcher with a focus on medical cybersecurity at the Institute for Security and Technology and former CISA staffer who reviewed the UCSD study. That means that even a shorter-duration outage in patient related services across hundreds of hospitals could have concrete and seriously harmful—if hard to measure—consequences. Aside from drawing a first estimate of the possible toll on patients' health in this single incident, the UCSD team emphasizes that the real work of their study is to show that, with the right tools, it's possible to monitor and learn from these mass medical network outages. The result may be a better sense of how to prevent—or in the case of more intentional downtime from cyberattacks and ransomware—protect hospitals from experiencing them in the future.
Forbes
29 minutes ago
- Forbes
In The AI Age, Star Trek's Still Alive
The Starship Enterprise flies over an orange planet in 'The Man Trap,' the premiere episode of 'Star ... More Trek,' which aired on September 8, 1966. (Photo by CBS) It's the age of AI, a time of runaway innovation – more and more of our lives are impacted by digital systems running on electronic hardware, and a lot of what used to be science fiction is now science fact. And then there's Star Trek – the enduring legacy of those who dreamed of space exploration and advanced technology back in the very analog days of the mid-to-late twentieth century. It wasn't too long ago that the ENIAC at UPENN and Project Whirlwind at MIT were humming away, mammoth systems with tape and spinning wheels. And as those large mainframes started to give way to the personal computer, as a new generation of digital users came of age, Star Trek was telling its stories: of a futuristic spaceship festooned with high-tech buttons, lights and dials that supported amazing capabilities. Some of those, with LLM capability, are now reality as well. The Star Trek Set Tour in Historic NY The Star Trek Set Tour experience in Ticonderoga, NY is just down the way from historic Fort Ticonderoga, where a little more than 250 years ago the French and British fought the seven years' war, before the formal foundation of the nascent United States of America. Only a couple of hundred or so years later, look at what we have built. Nearby, in a former Ticonderoga supermarket, James Cawley has recreated a lot of the set pieces and costumes of the original Star Trek show - that takes place 250 years in a fictional future. And it's amazing. The place is open to the public, for a reasonable admission fee, and many have walked through its halls. William Shatner has visited a dozen times, too. I recently took my annual trip there and got to talk to Cawley about his project. Speaking to him, you get a sort of picture of what it was like to be involved on the ground floor, recreating all of these timepieces in a new world where the designs are so retro. In the late 1980s Cawley cold called the studio during the Star Trek Next Generation production and landed a job on the costume staff. When his boss there passed away he left him the original set blue prints to the 1960s TV series which he use to recreate the set. He said he also rewatched the original three seasons of shows to be able to get the look and feel of the sets. 'It hit at the right moment in time, where it needed to say what it said, and reach the people that it reached,' he said, of the original Star Trek show. 'Kennedy had been killed, and we were going through a lot as a nation, and Star Trek had the courage to go on TV and say: 'Nope it's going to be OK. We're going to get there, and we're going to do it together.' He talked about how media changed from VHS and DVD to Blu-ray and 4K, and how, in that intervening age, computing hardware changed, too. 'We've had to take things apart and redo them,' he said, showing off some of the set work that visitors see as they move through the space. The project, he said, has evoked a strong reaction in more than a few people. Some cry. Some don't want to leave. All of this, to me, speaks to the power of nostalgia – as our lives change so much, we like to interact with the past. The Serene Setting As for why this museum of sorts is located here, in Ticonderoga, and not in a big city, Cawley did point out the practicality of the choice. 'You're looking at 13,000 square feet,' he said. '(It would take) millions and millions of dollars to do this in a big city, and then it's not practical. You wouldn't sell enough tickets to warrant that - they couldn't keep the Star Trek experience in Las Vegas going for a length of time, because real estate is expensive, and things change, so I think here, it works, because it's a small community.' Star Trek Through the Lens of AI Think about this: in the 1970s and 1980s, we experienced a premonition of AI through the iconography of shows like Star Trek. As you look at that dated gear, and the types of stagework that cast and crew did, you can see the foreshadowing of everything we now enjoy due to the work of neural nets. My Visit: A Visual Experience As I toured, I got to see some of the visuals that the original actors would have seen as they went 'where no man had gone before.' Here are some of the photos I took while experiencing the set. Captain's chair on the bridge of the enterpriseShip's corridor Another shot of the bridge Sick bay The location At the helm Transporter room - me beaming back to the shop And I think this really showcases how many of us feel as we contemplate a future with AI: We're seeing it through the lens of vintage sci-fi. Just a thought.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Why MAGA hates science so much
Against all the evidence of horrific, devastating weather around us, climate change is still a 'hoax.' A measles outbreak sparked by anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists now extends beyond Texas to 34 states. Republicans are doing all they can to shut down funding for medical research. Why does MAGA hate science? Shall we count the ways? Because scientific advances don't discriminate between the 'worthy' and those considered unworthy, and because some in the billionaire class think they deserve to live much longer than you do. As they prep their fancy-shmancy bunkers or delude themselves that they can one day head off to Mars to escape their wanton destruction of the Earth, the billionaire bros know they can avail themselves and their children of lifesaving vaccinations and other health care services that they are putting out of reach for many of us. But it's not just the small — and small-minded, and small-hearted — wealthy libertarian or right-wing elite. Working people who choose to wear MAGA red caps hate science for their own reasons: It tells them things about disease and environmental destruction and, say, women's reproductive health that they cannot bear to face. Scientific findings often do not jibe with their religious beliefs. If you believe the Earth is 6,000 years old and were never taught how to distinguish between faith and knowledge, you're naturally going to have a testy relationship with science. By its nature of openness to new ideas, scientific inquiry exemplifies the secular worldview of liberals. Science levels the playing field. It's woke. Scientists discriminate about the significance of evidence, but they do not discriminate about the significance of different human beings. (That is what the MAGA faithful think their religion is for — because Republicans have spent a long time perverting Christianity, too, to justify their greed and bigotry.) From reading the writers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson knew science was evening out the social playing field. In an article for Smithsonian magazine, historian Stephen E. Ambrose notes that amid all the contradictions of his personal life, Jefferson never relinquished his idealism about all men being created equal: In his last message to America, on June 24, 1826, ten days before he died on July 4 (the same day that John Adams died), Jefferson declined an invitation to be in Washington for the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. He wrote, 'All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.' There's the danger to those who consider themselves superior — by race, color, creed or position on the Forbes annual list of billionaires — to the mass of men and women. Scientific advancements make us ever more aware that we are all the same and should enjoy the same basic rights to education, health care, civil liberties like voting, freedom of and freedom from religion, and the freedom to read or otherwise consume whatever opinions or cultural works we choose — the very things that the current occupant of the White House and his MAGA followers are working to take away from us. Beyond the historical friction between science and religious beliefs (for which earlier scientists could be imprisoned or burned at the stake), the main reason MAGA hates science is human-caused global climate change. Al Gore famously called global warming an 'inconvenient truth,' but Donald Trump persists in calling it 'a hoax,' while defunding climate research, green technology, NOAA and FEMA. The COVID pandemic gave MAGA followers many more incoherent reasons to distrust science, while watching 'their favorite president' politicize every aspect of the response. Apparently, millions would rather suffer mightily — or even die, as many willfully unvaccinated people did — than admit they were wrong. It's a sad aspect of human nature to feel we have such sunk costs in our often-wrongheaded opinions that we are willing to perish for them. I was a biology major in college for a few years, with vague plans of medical school, vaguely until I switched to journalism. I would not pretend to be a scientist based on that curtailed education, but I did spend 36 years in medical publishing. As a production editor and later as a submission systems manager, I came to understand the significant work of researchers and the selfless work of the many peer reviewers who help editors determine which studies merit publication. For many journals I worked with, the acceptance rates were astonishingly small. MAGA conspiracy heads might call that publication process elitist, and claim that people with worthwhile ideas are being kept out of the conversation. Most people in the sciences, however, understand the process as separating the wheat from the chaff by culling out the many papers that for one reason or another — perhaps poor design or insignificant findings — fail to advance scientific knowledge. But you don't need any understanding of science to understand that what Trump and his party of grifters and religious zealots are doing to universities by withholding research funding will be economically devastating to this country, slowing scientific progress and seriously disrupting the lives and careers of many researchers, technicians, lab assistants and students. The long-term negative effects of Trump's attack on science, which are also part of the full-spectrum MAGA assault on education and the nonpartisan civil service, will likely be even worse. Students will be increasingly reluctant to pursue careers in science. Only a months ago, STEM courses in high school and college were viewed as critical to the future of American ingenuity and enterprise, a big part of what actually made America great. It's impossible to gauge just how much damage will be done as we ban vaccines, deny climate science and make measles great again. Many MAGA supporters don't want to share 'their' America with brown people who may or may not be citizens; too many of them welcome the persecution and deportation of longtime U.S. residents who put in long hours at child care centers, hotels and restaurants, construction and landscaping companies, hospitals and nursing homes, and in agricultural fields, doing the thankless and often grueling work of picking and delivering the crops that feed the nation. Britain's decision to leave the European Union — one of the worst self-inflicted wounds of recent political history — has cost the U.K. an estimated 6% drop in GDP so far. The probable result of MAGA's lust to spend billions on hiring more masked, secret police-style ICE agents to deport hard-working, tax-paying immigrants, even if we look beyond the human suffering, will be a Brexit-level recession on steroids. Ultimately, what our felonious, ever-grifting president wants to do is to destroy all expertise in this country. That's what autocrats do. The manchild MAGA leader can't stand for any so-called experts to question him when he makes idiotic suggestions about public health proposes setting off nuclear bombs inside a hurricane or tries to change the longstanding name of a geographical feature to gratify his fragile ego. He wants to claim that his supposedly big and beautiful bill is the most popular legislation in history and that he's the greatest president ever, and doesn't want to hear egghead historians tell him otherwise. Trump hates to be questioned — so he hates journalists, scientists and anyone else with the kind of education that encourages critical thinking. That's why he has surrounded himself with an entire Cabinet of white nationalist frat boys, shameless sycophants and fellow grifters — not to mention a supermajority of right-wing Supreme Court justices who appear ready to hand him absolute power. 'American Robin,' a poem by Barbara Crooker that was recently featured in George Bilgere's 'Poetry Town' newsletter, is about our inability to respond appropriately to the devastation of human-made climate change. But it applies equally well to all the anti-science, misogynist, racist, Dark Enlightenment nonsense coming from the right that seeks to rob you, your children and your grandchildren of a financially and environmentally secure future. It begins this way: Here's that bird again, launching from the rhododendron, banging his forehead on my living room window. Thump. Thump. Does he see his own reflection in the glass or does he see a rival, a threat to his nest? I hang a black raptor silhouette in the middle square, but that does not deter him. Knock yourself out, I keep thinking. Next, I try cardboard, then a sheet of newspaper smeared with its terrible news. He comes back. Do I admire him for his persistence or shrug at his stupidity? Thunk. Thunk. Read the whole poem; I'll wait. One could read Crooker's dismay at the American robin's thumps and thunks against her windowpane as a rhyme for the name of a certain infamous conman turned populist demagogue. But that is perhaps unfair — to the poet and the bird. This article previously appeared in slightly different form at Medium. Used by permission. The post Why MAGA hates science so much appeared first on Solve the daily Crossword
