Braving bone-chilling temperatures reaching – 7°C, Sonam Wangchuk and his team of volunteers are busy raising ice stupas in the Himalayan highland of Ladakh, as you read this.

“We began work in November and will continue till March,” says Wangchuk, recipient of the latest Rolex Award for Enterprise, over a long-distance call and choppy network. “By the end of winter, we hope to complete seven stupas. “

With the Himalayas creating a rain shadow, denying entry to monsoon clouds, Ladakh remains a high-altitude desert, known to film-goers for its silver sand. The main source of water in this sparsely populated region is the winter snowfall, which Wangchuk wants to capture by raising ice stupas.

The arid heights

During the early crop-growing period, between April and May, the farmers in this arid landscape face acute water shortages. Additionally, global warming and shrinking glaciers have made things worse, leaving little water for irrigation. Says Wangchuk, “Access to water in the desert landscape of many high-altitude towns and villages of Ladakh can be improved if the huge seasonal outflow of glacial water is frozen in a way that it melts gradually during spring to be made available to the locals when they need the water the most.”

Wangchuk had earlier worked with Aba Chewang Norphel, a fellow Ladakhi who had created flat ice fields at 4,000 m and above; but as villagers were reluctant to climb to that height to maintain them, it failed to serve the purpose.

Driving past a bridge over a stream near the SECMOL Alternative School that he runs in Phey (Leh), Wangchuk had once come across a big chunk of ice protected from the sun underneath the bridge in the month of May. This gave him the idea of building conical ice mounds with minimal surface area. He named this ‘ice stupa’, which, in all likelihood, would melt much slower than flat fields of ice, even if exposed to sunlight.

The ice stupas are formed using glacial water brought from higher ground through buried pipes, whose final section rises vertically. As pressure builds in the pipe, the water exits from the raised tip into sub-zero air and freezes as it plunges to gradually form an ice cone or stupa, much like the Tibetan religious stupas dotting the landscape. In late-spring the melt water is collected in large tanks, and then fed to cultivated fields using drip-irrigation.

Local support

In 2014, Wangchuk and his men successfully built a 7-m tall prototype ice stupa, which lasted until the second week of May. It was visited by His Holiness Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang Rinpoche and the monks of the nearby Phyang monastery, who appealed to the locals to adopt the innovative technology.

Soon a 2.3-km pipeline system was laid to bring glacial water to the village, thanks to the monastery and a crowdfunding campaign that paid for it.

In 2015, the ice stupa grew to a height of 20 m and lasted till early July, supplying one million litres of melted water to 5,000 saplings planted by the villagers and monks.

“We are looking at roughly 1-10 million litres of water, depending on the size of the stupa,” says Wangchuk, who happens to be the second Indian to win the $10,000 Rolex Award, the first being the herpetologist Romulus Whitaker.

Ice stupas are now being replicated in other parts like Sikkim and even Swiss Alps “ as a tourism attraction in the short term and a glacier enhancement measure for the long term”.

The writer is an independent journalist based in Mumbai

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW