grains, many villagers had left their fields to find work in the new tourist industry in Leh or elsewhere in India. The old trade and cooperation system was abandoned in favour of a new money-based economy. ‘The attitude completely changed: If I wanted any of the villagers to repair a canal or help build a new glacier, I had to pay them. No one does anything for free any more,’ Norphel says.
Norphel’s ingenious idea was to divert the winter ‘waste’ water from its course down the mountain, along regularly placed stone embankments that would slow it down and allow it to spread and trickle across a large surface depression a few hundred metres from the village. Here, the slowed water would freeze and pack into a glacier. He shows me the glacier site, pointing out the path he sends the water on until the rocky valley starts to take shape in my mind and I see how the glacier forms. Siting is everything. The glacial area is shaded by a mountain face during the winter months, when the sun is weak and low. By March, when the sun rises high enough, the thick ice sheet begins melting, pours into a water tanker and through a sluice gate to the farmers’ irrigation canals. The meltwater also helps recharge the groundwater aquifer. This water is so precious that during the irrigation season a man has to sleep by the sluice gate to guard against water theft.
The rocks beneath the ice sheet channel mountain breezes, cooling the sheet further. And Norphel points out second and third artificial glacier sites at successively higher elevations. ‘By the time this lowest one has melted, the middle one will start to melt,’ he says. ‘Then the highest one and, finally, the natural glacier at the top of the mountain.’ He is grinning now, and I can’t help joining him: it’s such a great invention.
He built his first artificial glacier with very little help, above the village of Phuktse. It was an immediate success, supplying an extra thirty days’ water to irrigation channels. ‘When people saw the benefits of the artificial glacier, they started helping me and we stretched the length of the glacier to two kilometres,’ Norphel says.
‘It was like a miracle, people quickly started to cultivate more land and started planting willow and poplar trees between their fields,’ says Phuktse farmer Skarma Dawa. ‘This technology is very good because it works and it is simple and there’s very little maintenance required.’ They are built using local labour and materials at a fraction of the cost of a cement water reservoir.
Norphel has built nine glaciers since. They average 250 metres long by a hundred metres wide, which he believes provide some 6 million gallons (23,000 cubic metres) of water each, although there has been no accurate analysis to date, and the undulating ground makes it difficult to guess the volume of ice in each glacier.
His work has earned him recognition from those he has helped – ‘I have a shelf-full of home-brewed beers and a trunk of khatag [ceremonial silk scarves given by Buddhists]’, he says – but there has been little interest from the scientific world. ‘I am trying to collect data on how and where the glacier forms best, and which parts precipitate first and why, so that I can improve on them and people can use the technique elsewhere. I lack scientific equipment. I have only my own observations.’
Norphel says he has already had some interest in his glaciers from NGOs working in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. ‘In some areas, reservoirs are a much more practical solution.’ ‘But in terms of water storage and release at the irrigation season, you can’t beat artificial glaciers.’
Creating glaciers from scratch, while pretty awesome, is not entirely new. People may have been doing it as far back as the twelfth century. Legend has it that when Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors set their sights on what is now northern Pakistan, the local villagers thwarted their advance by growing glaciers that blocked the mountain passes. The practice of ‘glacier grafting’ is known to go back centuries in Baltistan, an ethnic-Tibetan region of the Pakistani Karakoram mountains, where people rely entirely on glacier meltwater for irrigation. The technique, which has an important ceremonial component, involves dragging ice from a so-called ‘female’ glacier (a fast-moving, surging glacier), and from a ‘male’ glacier (a slow-moving, rock-strewn glacier) and planting them at a specific site – usually on a northern side of the mountain, above 4,500 metres. The ice is planted on top of boulders and interspersed with gourds, which burst and freeze, after which the ‘mated’ ice is insulated with a covering of cloth and sawdust. Similar techniques, whereby ice is planted above air-channelling boulders, are practised in Argentina, often in shaded areas like caves. So-called ‘rock glaciers’, in which the ice sheet forms from frozen snowfall, produces a purer meltwater that is often preferred to ‘true glaciers’, which contain gathered material and melt into a milky run-off.
Recreating the glaciers lost to human-produced global warming is an imaginative solution to the very real problems that alpine villagers face and, perhaps because its impact is local and grounded, this particular geoengineering technique seems uncontroversial. In richer countries, such as Switzerland, ski-resort managers already spend thousands of dollars on artificial snow and ice, and on preserving the cold stuff where it still exists, using giant reflective blankets. In 2008, a German professor constructed fifteen-metre-high, three-metre-wide wind-catching screens to channel and trap the cool winds flowing down the mountain on to the Rhône glacier in Switzerland. If it works over time, he intends to repeat the process on other glaciers.
Norphel doesn’t have access to technological blankets or screens – he can’t even analyse the efficacy of his glaciers with real accuracy. But, while I am with him, he receives his first scientific visitor, Adina Racoviteanu, a geography graduate at INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, who is passing through en route to her glacier field stations further east. She offers to make him a topography map of the artificial glacier site using her handheld GPS monitor. Norphel’s eyes light up in boyish excitement. ‘That would be wonderful,’ he says, and the pair spend a happy couple of hours taking readings across the site, achieving in that time what would take Norphel weeks to do with his tape measure and plumbline. The device they are using, on loan from Racoviteanu’s institute, costs $3,000, but before she leaves for her ‘real’ glacier, she tells Norphel that models are available for as little as $300. ‘If I could get one of those, how much easier this would be,’ he sighs.
Norphel reckons that more than seventy-five other Ladakhi villages are in suitable locations for his artificial glaciers, each of which provides an estimated 6 million gallons of water a year, but lack of funding is holding him back.
We make our way down the valley to Stakmo, stopping by Tashi’s house. ‘This man is a hero,’ Tashi tells me. ‘The artificial glacier he has given us allows me to grow potatoes, which need to be planted earlier in the season, and my harvest is so much bigger. I grow tomatoes and other vegetables as well now. I make three times as much income.’ The new irrigation has allowed him to take advantage of the warmer conditions. Climate change is ushering in novel farming opportunities across the region (where water is available), and a whole range of vegetables – aubergines, apples, sweet peppers, watermelon – are now growing at high altitudes where previously farmers struggled to sow barley among the ice and desert.
Tashi’s new fortune may be short-lived, though. Climate change is also altering the precipitation patterns here, bringing less snowfall during wintertime when it is needed to contribute to the artificial glaciers. ‘These glaciers are not magic formations,’ Norphel says. ‘They need to build over winter.’
The artificial glaciers are not a long-term solution to the climate-change problems people are facing here, but they do provide a breathing space for some of the poorest people to adapt. Further into the Anthropocene, this entire region is likely to become uninhabitable for the majority of farmers currently living here. Norphel is giving these Buddhist people a few more precious years in the homes, landscapes and communities that their ancestors have prepared them for, where their traditional songs and tales are set, and their language is understood.
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Norphel
