Melting glaciers have become one of the symbols of the climate changes, and the glaciers are shrinking at an extremely quickly pace in most of the world. A mechanical engineer named Sonam Wangchuk decided that instead of only stopping the melting of the current glaciers, we should also be working towards creating new, artificial glaciers to help reducing the impacts of the global warming.
This project might seem like it’s impossible, but the it has actually begun in India, and the first glacier is already functional. The basis of the entire project is pretty easy: pipes are bringing water down from the mountains into a vertical pipe. This sprouts the water out like a fountain without any need for electricity, and the water freezes to ice before it hits the ground. After a while a miniature cone-shaped ice-mountain is formed from the ice, which will gradually melt just like a regular glacier. It is of course not as big as a real glacier, which are mostly remnants of the last Ice Age, meaning they've had over 100,000 years to grow, and over 10,000 years to melt before reaching the point they are currently at.
The idea is that after several years of down-stream water flow in the pipes, the ice-mountain will look and behave like a real glacier, and it should melt to provide water during the summer, while not completely vanishing. This gives the villagers downstream a fresh supply of water during the drought of the summer, and everyone benefits.
The pilot project melted during the 30 degrees Celsius (86°F) summer heat, but a bigger glacier or a cooler climate could easily solve this problem.
The project is possible because of crowdfunding!
The Ice Stupa project was made possible because of an Indiegogo campaign in which the company managed to raise $125,000, which was enough to make the project a reality. It’s really great to see that crowdfunding campaigns are doing stuff like fighting climate change, and not only produce indie games. Now, imagine how much money they could raise if they had blogged about the project on Steemit alongside the production!
Can these artificial glaciers be common?
What I find really exciting about this project is that it is really cheap, and seems to be effective! It only requires pipes from the mountains, and don’t need any maintenance besides fixing broken pipes. If this project is successful we might see lots of these man-made glaciers in mountain regions in the future!
The Ice Stupa project recently won the Rolex Award for Enterprises, and they intend to use this money to create 20 more artificial glaciers that are 30 meters high! It will be very exciting to see how this all turns out!
Thanks for reading!
About the author
Hi, I’m @valth! I live in Norway with my wife, our baby, and our two dogs, one of which is seen wearing a bow tie in the profile picture!
I am very passionate about nature and biology, and have been studying ecology for a few years now. My passions are mostly within conservation biology, mycology (the studies of mushrooms), botany, animal behavior and general microbiology. I really enjoy both the theoretical aspect, as well as the more practical aspect of biology, and I spend about as much time in front of biology textbooks as I do spend on finding and identifying plant, mushroom and animal species in the forests.
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