The Khmer rules off the challenge magnificently. They decided that rather than being at the whelm of the monsoon, they would make it work for them. This is part of a vast network of irrigations holds it crisscross the whole of Angkor. When the Khmers started digging this in the 9th century, people had seen nothing like them. This was plumming on a grand scale.

 

From the air, it's still visible today. Over 1,000 years ago, the Khmers managed to dive out a river pipe amazingly. They built canals that extended over an area of 400 square miles, and dug reservoirs could hold around 130 billion gallons of monsoon water. With this system, the Khmers seized control of the planet’s water cycle. They turned the seasonal rainfall of the monsoon into a reliable, all year round water supply. It was an enormous achievement enabling Angkor at its peak to support a population in excess of 1 million.

 

Thanks to the control of water, the Khmers had built the largest pre-industrial city in the world. The Khmers hung on its lead to the 15th century, which was when the Kingdom of Angkor finally went to the war. There were victims of the water success. The population went through the roof and they simply extracted the resources including despite all that incredible engineering, including the water supply. I guess there're limits to even the mighty monsoon can sustain.

 

Today, we control water on a massive scale. The world's reservoirs now hold/ up to 2,500 cubic miles of water. That's five times as much water as in all the rivers on Earth. And because most of it is pulled in the more populated northern hemisphere away from the equator, the extra weight has slightly changed how the earth's spins on its axis. If not for lunar drag, it would have caused the Earth's rotation to speed up, shortening the day by two millionth of a second for the last 40 years.