There’s a greater technique to construct a glacier.
During winter in India’s mountainous Ladakh area, some farmers use pipes and sprinklers to assemble building-sized cones of ice. These towering, humanmade glaciers, known as ice stupas, slowly launch water as they soften in the course of the dry spring months for communities to drink or irrigate crops. But the pipes usually freeze when circumstances get too chilly, stifling development.
Now, preliminary outcomes present that an automatic system can erect an ice stupa whereas avoiding frozen pipes, utilizing native climate knowledge to manage when and the way a lot water is spouted. What’s extra, the brand new system makes use of roughly a tenth the quantity of water that the traditional methodology makes use of, researchers reported June 23 on the Frontiers in Hydrology assembly in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
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“This is one of the technological steps forward that we need to get this innovative idea to the point where it’s realistic as a solution,” says glaciologist Duncan Quincey of the University of Leeds in England who was not concerned within the analysis. Automation might assist communities construct bigger, longer-lasting ice stupas that present extra water throughout dry intervals, he says.
Ice stupas emerged in 2014 as a method for communities to deal with shrinking alpine glaciers as a result of human-caused local weather change (SN: 5/29/19). Typically, high-mountain communities in India, Kyrgyzstan and Chile pipe glacial meltwater into gravity-driven fountains that sprinkle constantly within the winter. Cold air freezes the drizzle, creating frozen cones that may retailer thousands and thousands of liters of water.
The course of is easy, although inefficient. More than 70 % of the spouted water could move away as a substitute of freezing, says glaciologist Suryanarayanan Balasubramanian of the University of Fribourg in Switzerland.
So Balasubramanian and his crew outfitted an ice stupa’s fountain with a pc that routinely adjusted the spout’s move charge primarily based on native temperatures, humidity and wind pace. Then the scientists examined the system by constructing two ice stupas in Guttannen, Switzerland — one utilizing a constantly spraying fountain and one utilizing the automated system.
After 4 months, the crew discovered that the constantly sprinkling fountain had spouted about 1,100 cubic meters of water and amassed 53 cubic meters of ice, with pipes freezing as soon as. The automated system sprayed solely round 150 cubic meters of water however shaped 61 cubic meters of ice, with none frozen pipes.
The researchers at the moment are attempting to simplify their prototype to make it extra inexpensive for high-mountain communities all over the world. “We eventually want to reduce the cost so that it is within two months of salary of the farmers in Ladakh,” Balasubramanian says. “Around $200 to $400.”