Global warming is rapidly melting the glaciers in Ladakh. The climate change is so radical that by 2100 it may reduce the volume of glaciers in the Everest region by 70%.
Ladakh receives a meagre 100 mm of rainfall annually and has extremely low temperatures. But, increasingly, warmer temperatures are causing floods in winter owing to the premature melting of ice. This causes water scarcity in spring, making it nearly impossible to grow any vegetation in the area.
To tackle the problem, Chewang Norphel, a retired mechanical engineer, created a water storage technique to create “artificial glaciers” in 1987. The Ice Man, as he was fondly called, engineered a method in which water was diverted and frozen in channels and reservoirs, which enabled irrigation in the warmer months.
The method was improved upon by Sonam Wangchuk, another engineer, who realised that Norphel’s method required high maintenance. He thus came up with the idea of building “ice stupas”, which resemble Buddhist stupas, to minimise the exposure of the ice to the sun. In 2015, Wangchuk raised Rs 75 lakh in donations to build a 30-metre-tall ice stupa that could release 10 million litres of water. The stupa “resembled the drippings of a gigantic wax candle” and, completed, stood 20 metres tall.
The technique, explained in the video above, may solve the water scarcity problem to a certain extent. Wangchuk, with his Stupa Ice Project, intends to build about 80 more such structures across Ladakh, which, he estimates, will produce about 1 billion litres of water.
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