The ice stupas of Ladakh: solving water crisis in the high desert o... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/apr/22/the-ice-st...

The ice stupas of Ladakh: solving water crisis

in the high desert of Himalaya
An ingenious idea to build artificial glaciers at lower altitudes using pipes, gravity and
night temperatures could transform an arid landscape into an oasis

An ice stupa created by the innovative engineer Sonam Wangchuk in Ladakh, India. Photograph: Courtesy of Sonam
Wangchuk

Michael Safi in Delhi

Saturday 22 April 2017 09.30BST

The idea crystallised in his mind one morning as Sonam Wangchuk was crossing a bridge
in the Indian Himalayas.

The engineer from Ladakh, in the Jammu region of north India, was already a famous
problem solver: a Bollywood lm loosely based on his life had grossed a billion rupees in
its rst four days.

But addressing the water shortages that threatened life in his mountainous home had
started to feel like an intractable problem until he saw the chunk of ice: still hanging,
improbably, beneath the bridge, long after the shards around it had melted.

In that moment, he says, I understood that it was not the warmth of the sun that was

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melting the ice on the ground. It was direct sunlight.

What Wangchuck saw reected in the ice that day was realised four years ago, when he
unveiled his rst ice stupa, an articial glacier that towered surreally over the
otherwise arid landscape, and for which in December he received a prestigious 80,000
innovation prize.

It is the latest solution to an old problem in the Himalayan foothills. Despite its
breathtaking scenery, life in Ladakh has always been hard. It is a desert at 10,000 feet,
receiving on average just 50mm of rainfall each year. The only reason people can live
there is the glaciers, Wangchuk says.

Each winter, titanic shelves of ice form at high altitudes and melt throughout the spring,
owing downwards into the streams that are the veins of civilisation on the mountain.
Lately, that cycle has faltered.

Unnaturally high global temperatures threaten ice shelves everywhere but researchers
believe Himalayan glaciers are shrinking more quickly than any on earth. Less water is
reaching Ladakhs farms and villages, and when it does, the volume of water from the
faster-melting glaciers can break the banks of streams, causing oods.

Wangchuk is not the rst to try to wring a more sustainable water supply from the
mountains. For centuries, inhabitants of the Hindu Kush and Karakoram ranges have
practiced glacier grafting, chipping away at existing ice and pooling the pieces at
higher altitudes, hoping to create new glaciers that can supply streams throughout the
growing season. Apocryphally, villagers in the 13th century grew such glaciers across
mountain passes to stop the advance of Genghis Khan.

More than a decade ago, another Indian engineer devised an update. Chewang Norphel
earned the nickname the iceman of Ladakh by using a network of pipes to divert
meltwater into articial lakes on shaded sides of the mountain. The water would freeze
at night, creating glaciers that grew each day as new water owed into the basin. Norphel
created 11 reservoirs that supplied water to 10,000 people.

The problem was that it couldnt be done in lower altitudes, where people actually
live, says Wangchuk. The lakes were also restricted to heavily shaded areas, and simply
melted too quickly to make up for the shortfall in water wrought by increasing
temperatures. Adapting the concept became Wangchucks obsession. The auspicious
chunk of ice on the bridge showed him how that could be done.

The ice needed to be shaded but how? he says. We couldnt have it under a bridge,
or use reectors, which arent practical at scale. So we thought of this conical shape:
making ice shade itself.

It was a kind of biomimicry: articial innovation based on natural phenomena, such as

velcro modelled on the way plant burrs attach to dogs, or new skin grafts that stick to
bodies by piercing the tissue and expanding, the same way parasitic worms x to the
intestines of their hosts.

The conical shape hit a sweet spot, maximising the volume of ice that can be grown,
while minimising the surface area exposed to direct sunlight. That means it keeps

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melting well into the spring, releasing up

to 5,000 litres of water each day by
storing it in the sky, Wangchuk says.

It also has the benet of resembling the

Buddhist stupas religious sites used for
meditation and worship that dot the
landscape, a crucial point for 50-year-old.
Because it resembles something we have
in our tradition, it is made more close to
the population, to their hearts, he says.

A view of the Phyang monastery in Ladakh. Photograph:

Stefan Walter/Rolex Awards

Synchronising his work with nature and tradition are key to the inventors practice.
Generally I like things to be simple and self-acting, he says. For me, simplicity is
beauty, simplicity is the ultimate satisfaction.

And the stupas are simple. They are formed by running pipes below the frost line, at
which temperature the water hovers between a liquid and solid state. Then the pipes
turn skywards, spraying the water into -20C air, using the bitter cold to freeze it as it falls
to earth.

The rst prototype, stretching 20 feet high, was built in October 2013, and expected to
melt by the beginning of May. It lasted eighteen days longer. A second much larger stupa
was grown near a forest of 5,000 trees, and kept them watered throughout the driest
months until 6 July.

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How the ice pyramids or articial glaciers work: gravity

pressure forces water up through a pipe to form ice stupas
that store water for the crop growing season. Photograph:
Sonam Wangchuk/Rolex Awards

Those two stupas were funded by crowdsourcing donations. Last year, Wangchuk was
awarded a Rolex innovation grant, money he will use to create the next generation of ice
towers. 20 more, each 100 feet high, are in the works.

He will also use the money to fund an alternative university in Ladakh to train young
people to see in their surroundings answers to the regions problems. Solutions for the
mountains, by the mountain people, he says.

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Topics
Glaciers/Half full: solutions, innovations, answers
Mountains/Water/Climate change/India/Sustainable development/features

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