Artificial Glaciers Miraculously Created In The Dessert Show How Good Indian Engineers Are

Sonam Wangchuck, an engineer from Jammu, north India, came up with the idea one day when he was crossing a bridge in the Indian Himalayas.

It had always seemed nearly impossible to address the water shortage problem in this home until he noticed a chunk of ice that’s still hanging a long time after the shards surrounding it had melted. At the time, he said:

“I understood that it was not the warmth of the sun that was melting the ice on the ground. It was direct sunlight.”

He created an “ice stupa,” which was basically an artificial glacier surreally towering over an arid landscape. In the foothills of the Himalayas, at the height of 3 kilometers, though the scenery is breathtakingly beautiful, it’s a dessert that gets an annual rainfall of only 50 mm. Wangchuck stressed that glaciers were the one thing that helped people live there.

Every winter, there are huge ice glaciers forming at high altitudes then melting throughout spring, which flows down into the streams for people living on the mountain to use. But that cycle has weakened recently.

Global warming has been threatening ice shelves but researchers believe that glaciers on the Himalayas are being affected the most seriously of all. As a consequence, farms and villages in Ladakh are getting less water and when there is water, it means the glaciers are melting faster, breaking stream banks and causing floods.

For centuries, people living in Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges have practiced grafting glaciers to obtain a more sustainable water supply by using at existing ice as well as pooling the pieces at higher altitudes with the hope to generate new glaciers to supply streams through the cultivating season.

Then, over 10 years ago, Indian engineer Chewang Norphel created an update, making himself called the “iceman of Ladakh.” He used a network of pipes in order to make meltwater run into artificial lakes on the mountain’s shaded sides. When the water froze at night, it would create glaciers that grew every day with new water flowed into the basin. Eleven reservoirs were created, supplying water for 10,000 people. He said:

“The problem was that it couldn’t be done in lower altitudes, where people actually live.”

Besides, the lakes were placed in heavily shaded areas where the melted water made up for the lack of water due to global warming. Wangchuck was obsessed with this concept and when seeing the chunk of ice, he figured out how he could do it.

The conical shape helped maximized the amount of ice to be grown while minimizing the surface exposed to the sun. That means, the chunk of ice keeps melting to provide 5,000 liters of water per day for people by “storing it in the sky,” Wangchuck said.

The stupas are simply formed by running pipes below the frost line, where the water hovers had temperature between the liquid and solid-state. The pipes then turn towards the sky and spray water into the -20 degree C air, freezing it as it falls to earth.

The first prototype stretched to 4 meters high, built in 2013. Then, another stupa was built near a forest with 5,000 trees. Take a look at these stupas, they are just gorgeous.

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