It's Huge: The Three Gorges Dam quiz

The dam was built on the Yangtze River in China. It is located near a town named Sandouping.

Construction started in 1994. It took the crews until 2012 -- 18 years later -- to finally make the dam an operational power station.

Three Gorges Dam is indeed the world's biggest hydropower project. With more than 22,000 megawatts of electricity-generating potential, it provides immense power to the electrical grid.

The Yangtze River is the Long River, and it is indeed long. It's the third longest river on the planet, and it's number one in Asia.

There are steep mountains along the area that surrounds the river and the reservoir -- so steep that it's much easier to travel on the river than on land.

For all of its impressive features, the dam isn't the tallest. It is about 180 meters tall. But there are taller dams, such as the 300m monstrosity called Nurek Dam, which is in Tajikistan.

It's a crazy long river, but there are just two major dams, Three Gorges Dam and Gezhouba Dam, the latter of which is much smaller and was completed in 1988.

Gobs of people had to move -- or were forced to move -- in order to make way for the project. About 1.3 million people were displaced.

Given the dam's size and the long duration of the project, maybe the numbers aren't as dire as you'd expect -- about 100 people were killed during construction.

As soon as water started piling up behind the dam, hairline cracks began appearing in the dam. However, experts say the concrete is up to snuff and won't fail under normal circumstances.

The dam traps unknown amounts of silt, or river sediment, behind its massive structures. Unless the authorities can control the silt, water volume will drop and the dam will be rendered useless.

Thirteen cities met watery ends thanks to Three Gorges Dam. Joining them were 140 towns and more than 1,300 villages… but who's counting?

The dam backed up river water into a very long reservoir. It's about 410 miles long and, in some places, it's a whopping 575 feet deep.

Once the dam was complete, water began rising in the reservoir, to the tune of about 300 feet on the nearby shoreline. In doing so, it flooded more than 1,000 known archaeological sites.

This is China, right? A lof the money was looted by corrupt officials looking to enrich themselves at the expense of displaced citizens. So you lost your home, but hey, water skiing!

It is about a mile and a half wide. It's also more than 600 feet tall, making it roughly five times bigger than the Hoover Dam in the United States.

The huge ship lift can hoist ships in just 40 minutes. That's much faster than the lock system, which takes about 4 hours.

A small city's worth of people. -- about 26,000 -- were working on the dam during peak construction. Even with all of those bodies, it took nearly two decades to finish the work.

The reservoir's rising waters cause instability in surrounding lands. This triggers massive, dangerous landslides.

The rigid Chinese government doesn't reveal unflattering information about landmark projects. Some experts say the $25 billion projection is far too low.

The dam and its reservoir present huge obstacles for railroads. Two portage systems for trains will help railroads operate without having to go hundreds of miles out of their way.

When it was first built, people thought the dam might be able to provide China with about 10% of the country's power needs. But as China's power demands have exploded, that number has dropped to about 3% of total demand... or even lower.

Why the long faces, terrorists? Oh, the dam didn't break and drown millions of people? That's because it's so big that even a nuclear bomb wouldn't cause a catastrophic torrent of reservoir water to cascade through the countryside.

To prevent excessive sedimentation from rendering the dam useless, the Chinese government plans to simply build more dams upstream. Some of the dams are already completed.

It sounds like urban legend, but it's true -- the damming of the river slowed Earth's rotation by about .06 microseconds. That's because the dam is slowing down such an incredible volume of water.

The Earth's rotation actually changes fairly often, either due to crazy construction projects or friction caused by Donald Trump's heavily sprayed hair. Either way, the change in rotation won't kill us. Probably.

Some people got the equivalent of about $7 per month for the "inconvenience" of watching their cities being flooded and homes washed away. Of course, many people got no compensation at all.

It wasn't exactly an ancient idea. It was first proposed by Sun Yat-sen in 1919. He was the first leader of the People's Republic of China.

China loves dams and hydroelectric power -- it has more than 86,000 dams and plans to build many more. Environmentalists say these dams could cause catastrophic effects to animal and plant species, not to mention humans.

A rare type of Chinese river dolphin couldn't handle the disruptions caused by the huge structure. The creature is now believed to be extinct.