The Tibetan monks built the glaciers to supply water to local villages Bashny.Net

Ladakh — TRANS-Himalayan mountain desert, located on the Tibetan plateau. The farmers of Ladakh are facing severe water crisis due to rapidly melting glaciers, but they decided to take matters into their own hands, creating a cone-like artificial glaciers or Ice Stupas.





The glaciers of Ladakh decrease in size year by year due to climate warming, in this regard, they began to give much less water in early spring. Glaciers give too much water flow for the hot summer months, then he gradually becomes smaller towards the end of the season. This situation is extremely worrying for local farmers and rural residents who rely on glacial water for centuries.





In January of this year, students from the local SECMOL school campus began to work on solving the issue of water scarcity, by creating artificial glaciers. Ice structures called Stupas over their similarity with the traditional stupas of Ladakh and Tibet.





By the end of February, students created a two-storey prototype structure, which saves approximately 150,000 gallons of surplus winter water flow. Similar cone structure was placed in a much smaller area of the surface with little isolation compared to the ice fields formed on a flat basis.





Structural design and calculations location was important for the project: "for Example, one Ice-cold Mortar with a radius of 20 m and 40 m tall would have saved about sixteen million gallons of water. If the same amount of water was frozen as flat 2m thick ice field thickness, the area presented to the sun, would be about five times more. So the sun and warm spring air would have melted it about five times faster," explained the Director of SECMOL, Sonam Wangchuk (Sonam Wangchuk).



After the first prototype was successfully proven, the project was blessed by the monk of Tibet, His Holiness the Drikung Kyabgon benefit Rinpoche (Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpochey), which then asked the full version of the artificial glacier in the green the vast deserts around Pang gompa.





To raise funds for Pang Ice Stupa, villagers and monks have launched a campaign of crowdfunding in order to provide herself a viable source of water in arid area Pang gompa. After this project will be funded, the goal will consist in the use of Ice Stupas to create enough water to green across the desert (about 1,500 hectares).