At an altitude of almost 4,000m, where rain is almost unheard of, the Himalayan village of Sakti is an unforgiving place to grow food. “Ladakh has a brutal, single-cultivation season,” says Gelak Gutme, a 65-year-old farmer who has spent his life growing wheat, peas and potatoes there. “It is a desert with an extreme climate.”
But conditions have worsened in his lifetime. Global warming has caused the small, low-altitude glaciers that once watered his fields to vanish. “Now there is scarcity of water. Last year I lost everything – my entire field got dried due to lack of water,” Gutme says.
“Himalayan villagers build ice stupas to replace vanishing glaciers, but bitter cold exposes the limits of innovation.”
For generations, those glaciers acted as natural reservoirs, explains Lobzang Fardod, a member of a local water management committee in Ladakh. “Small glaciers sitting right above the valleys acted like frozen water towers, holding onto water all winter and releasing it right when spring farming began,” he says. “Now that those lower glaciers have completely vanished into a desert of dry rock, there is nothing left at the top to melt.”
The mountain summer is short – farmers must plant by May or risk losing their crops to the returning winter. A reliable source of water in early spring is critical.
In the early 2010s, some villages tried to create their own reservoirs of ice. The system involved piping water from higher up in the mountains during winter and spraying it into the air, where it would freeze, forming large towers of ice known as ice stupas. These structures successfully supplied melt water in the spring, but managing them under harsh winter conditions was a “nightmare”, says Fardod.
If temperatures dropped quickly below minus 20C, or sometimes minus 30C, the water in the pipes was liable to freeze, cracking the pipes and ruining the system. To guard against that, teams of four or five farmers would camp high up near the water source during winter, rushing to any potential blockages with boiling water, often during the night when temperature drops were most likely.
But enduring those freezing, winter nights high in the mountains could be phased out. “Because traditional water systems are failing, Leh-Ladakh has become a hub for innovative, grassroots hydraulic engineering,” says Murtaza Ali, executive engineer in the Irrigation and Flood Control Division at the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council.
As well as the risk of cracked pipes, the ice stupa system was not very efficient, Ali adds. Because water flowed constantly, on warmer days fresh water would melt the ice that had already formed. The race is on to find a better way to hold back the meltwater – before the next spring comes without it.