I have no idea if this has ever been discussed here before but I have been thinking lately about global weight transfer.

as in.. when buildings are built and weight is transfered around the world such as through shipping channels and the like. I know that there is only a certain amount of weight to the entire planet, but that weight gets moved around daily, and is has been moved around for as long as trade channels have been open. But in the technological age we are in we are moving more weight more rapidly around the globe.

So what happens when a country becomes overweight due to getting more weight on its plate than it can handle? Is it enough to overload the plates we are sitting on until one day.. SNAP! Earthquakes.. tsunamis.. volcanic eruptions?

Picture a ball of clay with a pencil through it.. Now spin the ball and take a chunk of clay off of one side and stick it to the other side. kind of a crude example but it gives you an idea of what we are dealing with here as far as weight is concerned and the way the earth rotates, not only is the rotation changed over time but excess pressure is put on the plates on which we happen to be residing on causing them to shift and crack.

So the question is: What happens?

Is this something we should give some thought to as a global society?

Opinions, ideas and theories welcome!

i would have to say when you look at the earths mass the impact we make would be very minimal

earth mass = 597,360,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg

so when you build a skyscraper its really only a spec of sand on top of a extremely large body.

You bring up a very good point here, but imagine the balance issues, should our society continue to flourish into the next millenium...

What's on the opposite side of the Serengetti?

How about opposite Southeastern Asia?

It's something to be considered, certainly, but as you say, at our current state...we're not likely to run into trouble.

Originally posted by sturod84
i would have to say when you look at the earths mass the impact we make would be very minimal

earth mass = 597,360,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg

so when you build a skyscraper its really only a spec of sand on top of a extremely large body.

A speck of sand.. Good example but lets look at it this way..

Lets just say that all specks of sand weigh the same amount..
Take a speck of sand from a beach, (1 speck only) put it in a vial. do this once every day for a year.. What happened? the weight of the sand in the vial is now 365 times the weight it was a year ago.

We are just moving specs of sand on a larger scale but weight is being transfered around the globe from coast to coast and internationally. Take a city for example.. 200 years ago there was dirt and a few trees maybe.
Zoom forward to 2005.. a city now stands with millions of tons of concrete, steel, plastic, fabric, etc, etc.. This all has weight and did not exist there before, it was all transported from somewhere else to emerge as a city that now stands in a place that was once only trees and dirt. (the city's footprint is now putting pressure on the earth below it.)

We have been transferring weight for hundreds of years, it only makes sense that over time it would have an effect of some sort.

I think nothing will happen either way because gravity holds everything in place....

I'd be more concerned about the actual movement of the mass, rather than it's ultimate location. If we ship materials to the east, we will eventually slow down the rotation of the Earth. If we ship them to the west, we will increase the rotation of the Earth. Think of a hamster in a hamster ball... it runs one way, the ball turns the other way. Admittedly, we're dealing with a very small percentage of the Earth's mass, but the effect will accumulate over time.

I propose new international laws that 1) only allow shipping directly north and south and 2)when shipping east or west, require an equal amount of mass to be shipped in the opposite direction.


[edit on 5-1-2005 by nataylor]

When buildings are built it usually actually lessens the weight in the area because the bedrock removed weighs more than the building. I remember reading somewhere that the island of Manhattan is much lighter now than it was before it was so highly developed. Of course the effect is still minimal. Major effects occur slowly over time as surface features such as mountain ranges and continental glaciers are created or eroded causing a depression, thickening, or isostatic rebound of the Earth's crust.

Originally posted by IgnoranceDenied

So what happens when a country becomes overweight due to getting more weight on its plate than it can handle? Is it enough to overload the plates we are sitting on until one day.. SNAP! Earthquakes.. tsunamis.. volcanic eruptions?

Extremely doubtful. If the earth were scaled down to the size of an apple, the crust, the part humanity and all life inhabits, would be thinner than the skin of the apple. Or so they say. And humanity has not even been able to drill thru the crust. So I don't think that there is anything that humans are going to accidentally do, certainly not by shipping products from one country to another.

However, during an ice age, the weight of the ice is enough to compress the ground that it rests on. Not sink the plates or snap fault lines or plate boundaries, but it does compress it very very slowly. When the ice leaves, it 'rebounds' very very slowly. Its still rebounding today in some parts of the world. There are earthquakes in the northeast region of the US that are a result of this rebound/decompression.

Look at it like this.

Near the end of the Pleistocene, most of the land-covered northern hemisphere (In North America down to the Utah-Arizona border, and in Europe almost to the Alps) was covered by an ice sheet a mile thick. Assuming 20 kg/cubic foot for ice, a one-square mile area of Pleistocene glacier would be 2,943,959,040,000 kg or about three-and-a-quarter billion tons. Assume that half of North American and Europe were covered (six million square miles), you have an unbalanced weight of about 19,430,129,664,000,000 (nineteen quadrillion) TONS.

This weight was so much that it actually compressed the land under it -- which is only now beginning to "rebound", which is why, some day, Chesepeake Bay will rise out of the water again.

Yet thre wasn't any adverse effect on either the Earth's libration or rotational speed.

And the weight of the Pleistocene Ice Sheet is probaably greater than that of a bunch of man-made buildings by a factor of about a billion.

I am once again intrigued by this sit and the threads i am reading. Not sure how much it would take to actually unbalance the earth but i do kno that the recent quake wobbled the earth on its axis so if it takes energy buit up under 100's of years of stress between to tectonic plates its hard to imagine how much weight we would have to put in one hemishere to unbalance our planet. Of course there always the unaccountable like major catastrophes removing a good chunk of our planet say super heavy mass or even just shipping mass of the planet to terreforming mars for instance.

Its an incredible idea as to how much it would take to unbalance the planet though.

yes i was watching a show on the discovery chanel that related to this. It was talking about the current dam that is being built in the three gorges canyon in china. It is going to be the world's biggest dam (600+ ft tall, 1.3+ miles wide). The show said this new dam sits on a massive fault line, and all the weight that is being transfered to this site could cause the earth to contract and cause a massive earthquake like the one that recently hit the indian ocean. The show also said if a earthquake ever hit the dam and destroyed it, about 5 million chinese would die . Ok enough rambling from me, hoped that help some.

Peace~Smurf

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Changes in the Earth's rotation [spin] don't have much effect on the Earth's revolution around the Sun.

How fast we spin has virtually no effect on our orbit around the sun.
We will just have to get used to a microfractional change in the length of a day.

Unless the planet loses or gains significant mass there is not that much to worry about.
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Originally posted by djohnsto77
When buildings are built it usually actually lessens the weight in the area because the bedrock removed weighs more than the building. I remember reading somewhere that the island of Manhattan is much lighter now than it was before it was so highly developed. Of course the effect is still minimal. Major effects occur slowly over time as surface features such as mountain ranges and continental glaciers are created or eroded causing a depression, thickening, or isostatic rebound of the Earth's crust.

Personally... I don't buy this theory.. Buildings are usually taller than the hole they are built in. Not only that but buildings are full of items that we use everyday. I find it hard to believe that the weight is lessened. However I could be wrong too, I wouldn't mind reading what you read stating that the city was lighter.

Originally posted by enlightened_smurf
yes i was watching a show on the discovery chanel that related to this. It was talking about the current dam that is being built in the three gorges canyon in china. It is going to be the world's biggest dam (600+ ft tall, 1.3+ miles wide). The show said this new dam sits on a massive fault line, and all the weight that is being transfered to this site could cause the earth to contract and cause a massive earthquake like the one that recently hit the indian ocean. The show also said if a earthquake ever hit the dam and destroyed it, about 5 million chinese would die . Ok enough rambling from me, hoped that help some.

Peace~Smurf

I hadn't thought about this one.. Water does weigh quite a bit and the chinese are gonna hold up quite a bit of it when the dam is finished. It'll be interesting to see how that works out.

Originally posted by IgnoranceDenied
Personally... I don't buy this theory.. Buildings are usually taller than the hole they are built in. Not only that but buildings are full of items that we use everyday. I find it hard to believe that the weight is lessened. However I could be wrong too, I wouldn't mind reading what you read stating that the city was lighter.

Buildings are mostly air. Bedrock is, well, solid.

I'm still not buying it.. I work in a 37 story building that sits on a full square city block. It only goes down 3 levels below ground and you expect me to believe that a building that is 37 stories tall weighs less than the 3 stories of dirt (Yes dirt. Not bedrock.. Dirt!) that was excavated to build this building? Your going to have to do better than that. Besides that.. A flat parking lot was in the spot where our building was built. There is a 37 story building in the place that a parking lot once sat. Nonetheless.. Weight has been transfered from one spot on the earth to another. The building DEFINITELY weighs more than the parking lot and the excavated dirt did.

Originally posted by IgnoranceDenied
I'm still not buying it.. I work in a 37 story building that sits on a full square city block. It only goes down 3 levels below ground and you expect me to believe that a building that is 37 stories tall weighs less than the 3 stories of dirt (Yes dirt. Not bedrock.. Dirt!) that was excavated to build this building? Your going to have to do better than that. Besides that.. A flat parking lot was in the spot where our building was built. There is a 37 story building in the place that a parking lot once sat. Nonetheless.. Weight has been transfered from one spot on the earth to another. The building DEFINITELY weighs more than the parking lot and the excavated dirt did.

Is your building a solid monolith or does it have massive gaps where desks and stuff go?

Our total dead-load impact on the earth may be minute, but what if we add centripedal force into the equation? It would only takes a small unevenly distributed mass to upset the rotational balance of an object spinning at high speeds