Читать книгу Adventures in the Anthropocene - Gaia Vince - Страница 12
ОглавлениеWhen early Earth’s shifting sludge of molten rock hardened into a crust, some 4.3 billion years ago, our planet got its first land cover. As this crust cooled atop the churning lava, like the skin on a pan of custard, it contracted and twisted, leaving some parts higher and thicker than others: the first mountains were created.
But the earth is never still. This solid ground, this apparently permanent land is imperceptibly shifting. Over the billions of years, the planet’s bubbling-custard turbulence has shattered the crust into scattered fragments, or sent its many islands crashing together to form huge continents. Several of these vast, coalesced supercontinents have merged and separated, each time creating an entirely reconfigured planet – the most recent and best known of these is Pangaea (‘all-earth’), which formed 300 million years ago before splitting up. Each time the drifting plates of crust have crashed into each other, the collision sends one edge above the other, creating a mountain. When the plates have drifted apart, the wrinkles are pulled smoother and the mountains sink. So some mountains on the planet are on the up, like the still-growing Himalayas, and others are dropping.
Mountains can also appear suddenly, through the process that gave birth to the original land masses, volcanism. Every so often, a bubble of molten rock spews out of a crack between the plates, and piles up on the surface of the land or seabed, creating a new mountain. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Kinabalu in Borneo appeared in this way.
When mountains first arise, they are sharp and jagged like the Himalayas, but over time, they round down as their surfaces erode, crumbling gradually away through glacial or river flows, or in the sudden slips of a landslide. Exposure to the air, wind, sun, munching microorganisms, and rain, also wear away mountain rocks in a process called ‘weathering’, which locks away carbon dioxide from the air as it reacts with dissolved minerals in the rocks.
Mountains are unusual because they have multiple climates. Usually, in order to experience a different temperature or weather system, you need to travel hundreds of kilometres north or south, but heading just a hundred metres up or down a mountain can have a similar effect. That’s because the air molecules in our atmosphere are not evenly spread out – they are far denser in a blanket near the ground. The higher you rise, the fewer molecules there are in the air to radiate back the sun’s heat, so it’s colder. That’s why mountains – even those on the equator, like Mount Kenya – have snow and ice on the top. When the altitude is combined with latitude, such as in Antarctica, the entire range can be hidden under deep snow and ice.
This change in climate produces interesting island-like ecosystems, with some species found only on specific altitude-defined spots on certain mountains where they have been isolated from their cousins for thousands of years.
The relative coldness up a mountain also generates the world’s largest source of fresh water, as moisture-laden air condenses against the peaks, relinquishing its load as rain or snow. And much of this remains where it accumulates, in mountain caches. For perspective, consider this: 97.5% of the Earth’s water is ocean or salty groundwater; of the remainder, just 0.01% is held in the clouds and rain, 0.08% is in all the world’s lakes, rivers and wetlands, 0.75% is in groundwater, while 1.66% is in glaciers and snow-packs. That means well over half of the world’s fresh water is stored in glaciers.
That’s how it was in the Holocene. But, as humans heat the planet in the Anthropocene, mountains are changing dramatically. Species seeking their usual living temperatures are climbing up the slopes at an average rate of twelve metres a decade, driven by global warming – they will need to migrate an estimated one hundred metres upslope for every 0.5°C of temperature rise.1 Clearly this is easier for animals than plants, but they too are moving – European vascular plants have shifted an average 2.7 metres uphill in the past seven years, for example.2 Other species have been marooned on peaks because their previous ranges have been occupied by human settlements or become farmland. Once at the top, though, there’s nowhere further to go, and thousands of species risk extinction, particularly those living on tropical mountains. Conservationists are now carrying out ‘managed relocation’ of species to places with a more a suitable climate, in the hope of saving them. In some cases, climate migrations have been beneficial, allowing people to cultivate fruit and vegetables higher up a mountain. But elsewhere, disease-carrying mosquitoes are now living at higher elevations where people with no immunity are being infected, with deadly consequences.
Of most concern to humans is the loss of ice. On average, glaciers have become fourteen metres thinner since 1970.3 Almost every single glacier looked at by the World Glacier Monitoring Service since 2000 has retreated, including all of the European ones, most of the tropical ones from the Himalayas through Africa to the Andes, and south to the mountains of New Zealand.
Humans have always worshipped mountains as gods or the home of gods, they have built temples high on their slopes and made pilgrimages to their peaks. In the Anthropocene, we are subjugating these geological marvels, turning them darker, drier and more homogeneous, stripping them of their unique flora and fauna, even decapitating them for the minerals inside. We are changing the shapes of Earth’s mountains – when they lose their protective snow, the exposed parts crumble away. Mountains including the Matterhorn in Switzerland are disintegrating.
Humans are still enthralled by the highest peaks, but the trails they make now to these heavenly reaches are more likely to be marked by litter than prayer stones. Nevertheless, even as we desecrate them, we depend more than ever on mountains for our fresh water.
In this chapter, I look at how the changes we are making to our mountains are affecting the people who live on them, and how humans are trying to recreate Holocene mountain conditions in the Anthropocene.
Temples rise above mudbrick houses and castles. Prayer flags flutter from every roof and woollen cloaked men and women with brightly coloured waist-sashes stand in the street gossiping. I’m in northern India’s remote Trans-Himalaya, in the the ancient kingdom of Ladakh. Consisting entirely of mountains, this, the highest inhabited region on Earth, is home to an 80% Tantric Buddhist population, settled by pilgrims and traders travelling the ancient Silk Route between Tibet and India or Iran.
In Stakmo village, farmers are preparing for harvest. Two men sit, chatting in sing-song tones against a dry-stone wall, sharpening their scythes with a blade pressed between their knees. An old woman with long, ribbon-woven plaits leads a donkey and calf over to her whitewashed mud-brick house. In the field behind, a yak munches alfalfa and swishes its horse-like tail. Bright marigolds nod crazily around a single apricot tree, and there is a barely perceptible tinkle of wind chimes. The scene feels timeless.
And yet, much has changed, the villagers tell me. ‘By mid-September, we would wake up with completely frozen moustaches,’ says Tashi, a 76-year-old farmer, who wears a woollen hat and large, pink-tinted sunglasses. Buddhist prayer beads hang around his neck and his dark sun-crinkled face is cleanish-shaven. I’m above 4,000 metres (13,000 feet), but nevertheless, it is not cold enough to freeze moustaches – from the clear, cloudless sky, the sun beams down intensely, as it does for more than 300 days of the year, and it’s burning my European face. The roof of the world is heating up.
Wedged between Pakistan, Afghanistan and China (or, more accurately, Tibet), Ladakh was a latecomer to the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and remains a contested territory. At night the Indian and Pakistani border patrols take potshots at each other; the Chinese come and paint Indian rocks red and the Indians respond by painting Chinese boulders green. But Stakmo feels very far from such nationalistic posturing. The villagers are more concerned with the ancient and essential task of coaxing food from the mountains’ mustard-coloured desert soils. Global warming is at play here, disrupting Ladakhi lives more effectively than any international land squabbles. Humanity is heating the region so fast that the mountains are changing colour before people’s eyes: from white to tobacco as the glaciers disappear. And with them, Ladakh’s only reliable water source.
In his lifetime, Tashi has seen two big glaciers vanish in this valley alone – he points out their locations to me and I see only the same dry, sandy and pink rocks that fill the eye between valley and sky. Just the very top peaks are white, and the only glaciers I spot are at least 5,500 metres up. The warmer climate is not the villagers’ biggest concern, though. In fact, they rather like not having to be confined to their houses so early in the year. The most painful change is the new unpredictability in precipitation. A catastrophic pattern is developing for moisture at the wrong time of year.
This part of the Trans-Himalaya, after the Rohtang Pass, is in a precipitation shadow. It’s drier than the Sahara, with no rain for months on end. The westerly winds don’t reach here and the monsoon from the east doesn’t surmount the high pass. The snows used to arrive after October and build during the winter. Then, in March, the snowpack would begin melting, providing vital and timely irrigation for the sowing of the area’s barley crop. But the past decade has seen a gradual reduction in snowfall – the winters of 2012–13 were particularly dry, with serious consequences. Harvests are failing, drinking water is trucked in by government tanker, traditional self-sustained communities are breaking up as young people migrate to the cities or plains for work. Worse, when the precipitation does come, it arrives as rain during the harvest season, ruining what few crops the villagers have in the fields, before disappearing to lower elevations.
The changes have also reduced the sparse natural vegetation. Thupstan, another Stakmo farmer, tells me that he used to let his livestock roam the mountains eating wild grasses. Now, though, he has to give over some of his valuable planting fields to grow alfalfa for the yaks and goats. And wild creatures too are feeling the pinch. Last week, Thupstan found fifty ibex in his field eating his vegetables. The ibex attract wolves, which eat his goats. And the ibex and wild yaks are destroying his stone walls, knocking them over and blocking the irrigation channels with boulders.
Nearby, in Ladakh’s principal town of Leh, the rainfall is also causing problems. This is a region that had never experienced rain before the past decade. Houses are built from unfired mud bricks, and the roofs are sticks bound with mud and yak dung, with a hole to let the fire smoke escape. These homes are built for snow, which covers and insulates them in winter. The new rain is literally washing them away. The more wealthy people are starting to concrete their houses.
A little rain at the end of summer is no substitute for snowfall during winter. It is quickly drained away in the rivers and there is little replenishment of the groundwater. The springs in Leh have been dry for months now, as more and more people pump out the groundwater. Wells sit dry and unused. Some of this is the result of a booming tourism industry. New hotels and guest houses are fitted with flushing toilets, twenty-four-hour showers and washing machines. It is completely unsustainable. The guest house I stay in has a traditional Ladakhi composting toilet, but few others still do. My landlady nevertheless gets all the water we use from a hundred feet below ground with a generator-driven electric pump.
The explosion of tourism, and a ruinous government policy on subsidies, are partly to blame for the new water shortages, but much of the problem is down to climate change, owing to rising global greenhouse gas emissions and the regionally produced brown haze. Data are pretty much impossible to obtain – the military jealously guards all such information – but the locals are unanimous in their conclusion: the glaciers here are disappearing – and fast.
People here are especially vulnerable, because they have such a brief summer. If farmers don’t sow their single crop of barley, peas or wheat in March, it won’t have time to mature for harvesting in September before the harsh winter sets in, with temperatures that drop below -30°C. The problem is, the glaciers that remain are too high at above 5,000 metres, and don’t fill the irrigation channels until June – too late for the sowing season.
Meanwhile, demands on the region’s water sources are growing. In the Anthropocene humans are infiltrating the farthest reaches of the planet in large numbers. Even those places that once only supported a few families are now host to regular flights from rich cities, bringing swarms of temporary migrants and their lifestyle expectations. As in so many places in the developing world, tourism has brought new wealth and possibilities to the people of Leh, but without water, this fertile patch in a mountain desert will return to dust.
The Himalayas is the largest area covered by glaciers and permafrost outside of the polar regions, containing 35,000 square kilometres of glaciers and an ice reserve of 3,700 cubic kilometres. Glacial melting is accelerating every year, with current annual retreat rates of seventy metres for some glaciers. Mountains are changing dramatically and so fast that we can use recently produced Google Earth images to watch the white bits shrink. Melting rates have already exceeded those predicted by the international community of climate scientists (IPCC) – they expect 70% of the region’s glaciers to disappear the same way as Stakmo’s by the end of the century. Meltwater from small mountain glaciers alone already accounts for 40% of current global sea-level rise, and is predicted to add at least 12 centimetres to sea levels by 2100.4
As mountain glaciers shrink, lakes are created from the meltwater, hemmed in by the moraine of rocks and debris that are left by the retreating ice. As with dams caused by landslides, when glacial lake dams breach, the outburst of millions of tonnes of water can cause devastating flash floods. Satellite images have revealed around 9,000 glacial lakes in the region, of which more than 200 have been identified as potentially dangerous, capable of breaching in a so-called glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) at any time. Many only appeared during the past half-century, and have been growing steadily since. People have always lived in danger zones, such as the slopes of a volcano or the banks of a flooding river – often to exploit the richer soils – but the risk has been from an ‘act of God’, a natural event. In the Anthropocene, we are increasingly producing our own danger zones and imposing them on communities that have no traditional preparedness for such events. The Imja glacial lake in Nepal, for example, is now two kilometres long and nearly a hundred metres deep. When it bursts, the deluge of water could reach sixty kilometres away, swamping homes and fields with rubble up to fifteen metres thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. Hydrologists in Peru are now building tunnels to drain away an Andean glacial lake, after another ruptured its banks killing 10,000 people – tapping controlled outflows from these lakes could provide much-needed irrigation and hydropower for local populations.
Over the Holocene, glaciers around the world fluctuated with changes in temperature or precipitation, but in recent decades, glacier melt has increased rapidly and become global. In the Anthropocene, humans are steering natural processes and cycles. We have pushed the planet beyond its natural state and crippled its capacity to self-regulate or to bring back the glaciers we’ve melted. And as glaciers melt into lakes, overall loss of humanity’s precious water increases because water evaporates faster than ice. Snow and glacial melt in the Himalayas are the source of up to 50% of the water in ten of Asia’s major rivers, including the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Yellow, Mekong and Irrawaddy. These are the most populous river basins on Earth, with more than 1.3 billion people depending on them for everything from agriculture to fishing. In the Anthropocene, we will either have to discover ways to live without the fresh water that mountain glaciers store for us, or replace Earth’s largest fresh-water reserve with massive concrete reservoirs. The former option would certainly jeopardise the lives of millions of people, not to mention eroding wetlands and other ecosystems. The latter is urgent – globally glaciers have, on average, lost almost a quarter of their mass in the past sixty years. Around the world, reservoir-building is already under way by governments, albeit on a woefully inadequate scale. China is constructing fifty-nine reservoirs to catch and store meltwater from its declining glaciers in Xinjiang province, a high-altitude desert, but it is incredibly expensive and logistically impossible to replicate everywhere the vast acres of ice with concrete tubs of water. Ideally, reservoirs would be built underground to reduce evaporative loss, but that only makes them more expensive. Nevertheless, the Anthropocene will surely experience a vast programme of reservoir-building.
However, there is another option. I’ve come to Ladakh to meet a remarkable man, who is taking on the global-warming challenge – and winning. The person they call The Glacierman dresses not unlike Clark Kent: beige sweater, sensible lace-up shoes. But, unlike comic-book superheroes, he’s 74 years old. He invites me into his beautiful family home in the small village of Skarra, near Leh, where, in a bid to peddle the ‘regular guy’ image, he presents his charming wife and daughter and we drink the peculiar local butter-chai and snack on almonds and apricots.
Chewang Norphel is no ordinary villager. He makes glaciers.
Norphel takes a barren, high-altitude desert and turns it into a field of ice that supplies perfectly timed irrigation juice to some of the world’s poorest farmers. So far, he has built ten artificial glaciers since he retired as a government engineer in 1995, and their waters sustain some 10,000 people. It’s hard to describe what an extraordinary feat this is. In one of the most climate-change-ravaged regions, Norphel, a one-man geoengineer, has effectively conjured up water, doubling agriculture yields as assuredly as if he’d swooped in wearing a cape and stopped global warming in its tracks.
In a display of energy and enthusiasm that is exhausting to witness, Norphel skips across the boulder-strewn landscape above Tashi’s village. He wants to show me his latest artificial glacier design, but I’m finding it tricky simply to breathe the thin air, 4,000 metres up. He carries a small backpack: tonight he will sleep in a tent 1,000 metres higher up, at temperatures that dip to -10°C, so as to continue his work in the morning. ‘When it is very cold and very difficult work, I have to remain focused. All I can think about is making the most successful glacier,’ he says.
Engineer, hydrologist, glaciologist, backyard enthusiast, Norphel has created his own field of expertise using scientific principles and training but the tools of an uneducated peasant. ‘What he has achieved in such circumstances, in remote parts of this mountainous desert, is remarkable,’ says Pankaj Chandon, coordinator of the WWF’s Indian High Altitude Wetlands Conservation Programme, based in Leh, who has followed Norphel’s progress over the past decade. ‘It is testament to his sheer force of character. But also, he has come up with a unique, innovative idea that provides water when it is needed. It is a fantastic adaptation technology for the climate changes that we are experiencing in this region.’
Norphel has always been focused. As a child, born into a farming family in Leh, he would take every opportunity while out minding the herd to scratch times tables and algebraic equations into the dirt with a stick. ‘I begged my father to let me go to school, and he agreed as long as I also kept up my farming duties. So I would rise at 4 a.m. and take the cows and goats for grazing before school. After school, I would rush home to help in the fields.’
In the 1940s, when Norphel was growing up, there was just one school in Leh, which taught in Urdu (not Ladakhi), and only up to primary standard. As the youngest of three brothers, Norphel would ordinarily have been sent to live in a Buddhist monastery, in part to reduce the family costs as his father would not have been able to afford secondary school. So, at 10 years old, Norphel simply ran away, travelling more than 400 kilometres to go to school in Srinagar, Kashmir. The only poor boy at his school, he paid for his education by cooking and cleaning for his teachers.
Graduating in science at the college in Srinagar, Norphel knew two things: he loved mathematics and science, and he wanted to help the farmers he’d seen struggling so hard during his early childhood. One of his heroes at this time was his father’s cousin, who had been to London and returned to Leh as Ladakh’s first engineer, built the town’s airport and the Leh to Srinigar road.
There was no university in the state at that time, so Norphel travelled south to Lucknow for a civil engineering degree, this time being taught in Hindi. He loved the rigour of the subject and the practical application of physics and material science. ‘You can really make a difference with engineering. You can solve people’s problems quickly and in a way that they can see,’ he says. ‘Simple projects, such as a well-placed bridge of good design, can make things so very much easier for people who have to otherwise walk a day or more out of their way.’
For Norphel, the whole point of his training has been towards using his knowledge in the service of his fellow Ladakhis. Engineering is a vocation for him in the same way that medicine might be to a doctor. Like Mahabir, his determination and effectiveness is transforming lives.
As soon as he qualified, Norphel returned to Leh to join his father’s cousin in the government of Ladakh’s rural development department as a civil engineer. It was an exciting time to be working, but also extremely challenging. There was hardly a road or bridge when he started in 1960, and everything had to be built by hand. ‘We had no funds even for pickaxes and shovels – people were using animal horns to dig in some places – but roads were the most urgent requirement,’ he says. ‘People had to travel everywhere by pony, and where the tracks were very poor, all the ponies would have to be unloaded so that the animals could cross the broken part, and then reloaded after. Journeys that took weeks can now be made in hours.’
Over the next thirty-five years, the enthusiastic, raven-haired engineer became a familiar sight in Ladakh’s villages. Unlike other government experts on secondment from elsewhere in India, Norphel became known for his genuine engagement in the villagers’ problems, and they grew to trust him. More than 90% of the population were subsistence farmers, living and working in tightly knit communities. There was no money around – everything was done through trade and cooperation – and when Norphel needed labour for his projects, people willingly came forward. ‘There is scarcely a village in Ladakh where I have not made a road, a culvert, a bridge, a school building, an irrigation system, or a zing [small water-storage tank fed by glacial meltwater],’ he says.
He approached each problem scientifically, experimenting by altering the variables until he arrived at a satisfactory solution – and always remembering that his designs had to be sustainable, using locally available materials. For example, he built a number of canals where instead of using an expensive cement lining that cracked during winter, he allowed weeds to grow and thicken, their roots naturally sealing the canal lining.
By the time of his retirement in 1995, priorities were shifting. Road-building was still important, but Ladakhis were becoming aware of a far more serious problem – one that threatened their livelihoods. ‘Every village I visited it would be the same thing: water scarcity. Glaciers were vanishing and streams were disappearing,’ Norphel says. ‘People would ask me to bring them water. Their irrigation systems were drying up and their harvests were failing. The government was starting to bring in grain rations.’ Norphel was determined to do something. ‘Water is the most precious commodity here. People are fighting each other for it: in the irrigation season, even brother and sister or father and son are fighting over water. It is against our tradition and our Buddhist teachings, but people are desperate. Peace depends on water.’
Inspiration came within a hundred metres of his house, one bitingly cold winter morning. ‘I saw water gushing from a pipe and was thinking what a shame it is that so much abundant water is wasted during wintertime – the taps are left open to stop the water freezing in the pipes and bursting them,’ he says. ‘Then I noticed that on its route to the stream, the water crossed a small wooded field, where it was collecting in pools. Where the trees provided shade, it was freezing into ice patches. By early March, the ice patches melted.’
Norphel realised that if he could somehow copy this on a much larger scale, he would have a way of storing up this winter water in an artificial glacier that would melt at just the right time for crop sowing and irrigation. It was a beautifully simple concept but achieving it would be fraught with difficulties. ‘People laughed when I first presented the idea and asked for funds,’ he says. ‘Officials and villagers were sceptical, “What crazy man are you? How can anyone make a glacier?” I was told.’ But Norphel soldiered on. He held meetings with village elders, and explained the concept. Gradually, his relentless enthusiasm caught on.
He had no equipment; no altimeter or GPS reader, not even a bulldozer. Perhaps just as challenging was the societal change that had occurred over the past decade. As water scarcity increased and the roads brought in trucks with government-subsidised grains, many villagers had left their fields to find work in the new tourist industry in Leh or elsewhere in India. The old trade and cooperation system was abandoned in favour of a new money-based economy. ‘The attitude completely changed: If I wanted any of the villagers to repair a canal or help build a new glacier, I had to pay them. No one does anything for free any more,’ Norphel says.
Norphel’s ingenious idea was to divert the winter ‘waste’ water from its course down the mountain, along regularly placed stone embankments that would slow it down and allow it to spread and trickle across a large surface depression a few hundred metres from the village. Here, the slowed water would freeze and pack into a glacier. He shows me the glacier site, pointing out the path he sends the water on until the rocky valley starts to take shape in my mind and I see how the glacier forms. Siting is everything. The glacial area is shaded by a mountain face during the winter months, when the sun is weak and low. By March, when the sun rises high enough, the thick ice sheet begins melting, pours into a water tanker and through a sluice gate to the farmers’ irrigation canals. The meltwater also helps recharge the groundwater aquifer. This water is so precious that during the irrigation season a man has to sleep by the sluice gate to guard against water theft.
The rocks beneath the ice sheet channel mountain breezes, cooling the sheet further. And Norphel points out second and third artificial glacier sites at successively higher elevations. ‘By the time this lowest one has melted, the middle one will start to melt,’ he says. ‘Then the highest one and, finally, the natural glacier at the top of the mountain.’ He is grinning now, and I can’t help joining him: it’s such a great invention.
He built his first artificial glacier with very little help, above the village of Phuktse. It was an immediate success, supplying an extra thirty days’ water to irrigation channels. ‘When people saw the benefits of the artificial glacier, they started helping me and we stretched the length of the glacier to two kilometres,’ Norphel says.
‘It was like a miracle, people quickly started to cultivate more land and started planting willow and poplar trees between their fields,’ says Phuktse farmer Skarma Dawa. ‘This technology is very good because it works and it is simple and there’s very little maintenance required.’ They are built using local labour and materials at a fraction of the cost of a cement water reservoir.
Norphel has built nine glaciers since. They average 250 metres long by a hundred metres wide, which he believes provide some 6 million gallons (23,000 cubic metres) of water each, although there has been no accurate analysis to date, and the undulating ground makes it difficult to guess the volume of ice in each glacier.
His work has earned him recognition from those he has helped – ‘I have a shelf-full of home-brewed beers and a trunk of khatag [ceremonial silk scarves given by Buddhists]’, he says – but there has been little interest from the scientific world. ‘I am trying to collect data on how and where the glacier forms best, and which parts precipitate first and why, so that I can improve on them and people can use the technique elsewhere. I lack scientific equipment. I have only my own observations.’
Norphel says he has already had some interest in his glaciers from NGOs working in Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. ‘In some areas, reservoirs are a much more practical solution.’ ‘But in terms of water storage and release at the irrigation season, you can’t beat artificial glaciers.’
Creating glaciers from scratch, while pretty awesome, is not entirely new. People may have been doing it as far back as the twelfth century. Legend has it that when Genghis Khan and his Mongol warriors set their sights on what is now northern Pakistan, the local villagers thwarted their advance by growing glaciers that blocked the mountain passes. The practice of ‘glacier grafting’ is known to go back centuries in Baltistan, an ethnic-Tibetan region of the Pakistani Karakoram mountains, where people rely entirely on glacier meltwater for irrigation. The technique, which has an important ceremonial component, involves dragging ice from a so-called ‘female’ glacier (a fast-moving, surging glacier), and from a ‘male’ glacier (a slow-moving, rock-strewn glacier) and planting them at a specific site – usually on a northern side of the mountain, above 4,500 metres. The ice is planted on top of boulders and interspersed with gourds, which burst and freeze, after which the ‘mated’ ice is insulated with a covering of cloth and sawdust. Similar techniques, whereby ice is planted above air-channelling boulders, are practised in Argentina, often in shaded areas like caves. So-called ‘rock glaciers’, in which the ice sheet forms from frozen snowfall, produces a purer meltwater that is often preferred to ‘true glaciers’, which contain gathered material and melt into a milky run-off.
Recreating the glaciers lost to human-produced global warming is an imaginative solution to the very real problems that alpine villagers face and, perhaps because its impact is local and grounded, this particular geoengineering technique seems uncontroversial. In richer countries, such as Switzerland, ski-resort managers already spend thousands of dollars on artificial snow and ice, and on preserving the cold stuff where it still exists, using giant reflective blankets. In 2008, a German professor constructed fifteen-metre-high, three-metre-wide wind-catching screens to channel and trap the cool winds flowing down the mountain on to the Rhône glacier in Switzerland. If it works over time, he intends to repeat the process on other glaciers.
Norphel doesn’t have access to technological blankets or screens – he can’t even analyse the efficacy of his glaciers with real accuracy. But, while I am with him, he receives his first scientific visitor, Adina Racoviteanu, a geography graduate at INSTAAR, University of Colorado at Boulder, who is passing through en route to her glacier field stations further east. She offers to make him a topography map of the artificial glacier site using her handheld GPS monitor. Norphel’s eyes light up in boyish excitement. ‘That would be wonderful,’ he says, and the pair spend a happy couple of hours taking readings across the site, achieving in that time what would take Norphel weeks to do with his tape measure and plumbline. The device they are using, on loan from Racoviteanu’s institute, costs $3,000, but before she leaves for her ‘real’ glacier, she tells Norphel that models are available for as little as $300. ‘If I could get one of those, how much easier this would be,’ he sighs.
Norphel reckons that more than seventy-five other Ladakhi villages are in suitable locations for his artificial glaciers, each of which provides an estimated 6 million gallons of water a year, but lack of funding is holding him back.
We make our way down the valley to Stakmo, stopping by Tashi’s house. ‘This man is a hero,’ Tashi tells me. ‘The artificial glacier he has given us allows me to grow potatoes, which need to be planted earlier in the season, and my harvest is so much bigger. I grow tomatoes and other vegetables as well now. I make three times as much income.’ The new irrigation has allowed him to take advantage of the warmer conditions. Climate change is ushering in novel farming opportunities across the region (where water is available), and a whole range of vegetables – aubergines, apples, sweet peppers, watermelon – are now growing at high altitudes where previously farmers struggled to sow barley among the ice and desert.
Tashi’s new fortune may be short-lived, though. Climate change is also altering the precipitation patterns here, bringing less snowfall during wintertime when it is needed to contribute to the artificial glaciers. ‘These glaciers are not magic formations,’ Norphel says. ‘They need to build over winter.’
The artificial glaciers are not a long-term solution to the climate-change problems people are facing here, but they do provide a breathing space for some of the poorest people to adapt. Further into the Anthropocene, this entire region is likely to become uninhabitable for the majority of farmers currently living here. Norphel is giving these Buddhist people a few more precious years in the homes, landscapes and communities that their ancestors have prepared them for, where their traditional songs and tales are set, and their language is understood.
* * *
Norphel is not the only independent agent defying humanity’s onslaught by geoengineering glaciers on Earth. In the Peruvian Andes, people are attempting to literally paint a mountain back to whiteness.
Licapa, at 4,200 metres up, is a village of people whose livelihoods are based around farming alpaca, the domesticated camelid of South America. This part of Peru, a hundred kilometres west of the town of Ayacucho, is one of the poorest in the country and was hit particularly hard in the 1980s and 90s during a decade of terrorism led by the Shining Path, a violent Maoist guerrilla group based here.
When I arrive at the village, below the Chalon Sombrero mountain peak, women are doing laundry in a small, grubby-looking pond, while a group of men repair one of the stone houses. These highlanders, who speak Quechua, the ancient language of the Incas, have spent the past twenty years trying to rebuild their broken communities, homes and lives, helped by various government schemes. But climate change is against them.
Salamon Parco, a young father, is fighting a personal battle against global warming. When he was the same age as his 5-year-old son Wilmer, he tells me, a river ran through the valley, watering the alpaca pastures. Women never used to wash in the pond, he says. But the glacier at Chalon Sombrero, 5,000 metres above sea level, disappeared completely twenty years ago, and with it the water. All that is left is a black rocky summit above a rocky channel where a river once ran.
Like Stakmo, it doesn’t often rain in Licapa, and what rain does fall is confined to January and February. The rest of the year, the high-alpine grasslands rely on glacial meltwater and, in its absence, turn yellow and die. More than 1,000 people have already left the village because they couldn’t feed their families, migrating to shanty settlements around Peru’s capital, Lima. Parco, with a wife and three young children, has considered the same. ‘But my home is here. What would I do in the city? I need to try and make it work here first,’ he says. Instead, Parco and his friend Geronimo Torres are spending every morning painting the black mountain white, hoping to bring back the glacier on which 900 people depend.
They began painting the mountain in May and by my visit in September, they have turned three hectares of black rock white. The remarkable experiment, backed by $200,000 in prize money from a 2009 World Bank climate-change adaptation competition, was conceived of by the rather eccentric and unlikeable Peruvian entrepreneur Eduardo Gold. The money, which Gold tells me he has yet to receive, is going to be used to build a factory in Licapa to produce lime paint for whitening the mountain.
The experiment is based on the principle that a black body absorbs more heat than a white one. By increasing the reflectivity of the black rocks using white paint, the mountain should be cold enough to retain the ice that forms on it – and eventually a glacier will be made. That is the hope, anyway.
There are plenty of sceptics, including Peru’s environment minister, who has said the money could be better spent on other climate-mitigation projects. And Gold, who has no scientific qualifications, has also been judged with some suspicion by agencies and public bodies.
Nevertheless, Parco tells me he is already seeing results. ‘In the daytime, the painted surface is 5°C, whereas the black rock is 20°C. And at night, the white surface falls to -5°C,’ he says. Ice has begun forming on the painted rocks overnight, although it has melted by 10.30 a.m.
The plan is to dig a small reservoir of water above the painted section and pump water up to it using a wind turbine, which would then be released during the night in a slow trickle over the paint, where they hope it would freeze. In time, the ice would build up and the process would be self-sustaining, because glacial conditions would be there: ‘Cold generates cold,’ Gold says. Parco and Torres have seventy hectares to paint in total, a job they had thought would take two years. They started the job with two other men, but fifteen days later, this other pair dropped out because there was no money to pay them.
‘We are still painting the mountain because it works, and because we have no choice,’ Parco says. ‘If there is no glacier, then there is no water for us and we will have to move away.’
I ask Lonny Thompson, an Ohio University glaciologist, who has been studying Peru’s glaciers for the past forty years, what he thinks of the idea. Painting the mountain may have some success in the short term in a local area, he tells me, but it is not feasible over greater regions. ‘Nobody is going to paint the entire Andean chain white,’ he says. What is needed now that the glaciers are disappearing, is man-made water storage to replace them. ‘This means a big programme of building dams and reservoirs, which is tricky in such an earthquake-prone zone, but necessary.’
It is unlikely that Parco’s remote village of Licapa will be prioritised for new waterworks in the next few years. Painting a mountain white may, however, produce enough ice in the next couple of years to buy the villagers time to adapt to a different livelihood.
Attempts to whiten the Earth’s surface to increase its reflectivity are also being considered on a far greater scale elsewhere. Methods to reduce the amount of the sun’s energy that heats the planet – called ‘solar radiation management’ – have the potential to rapidly counteract regional or even global warming. With global temperatures almost certain to exceed the 2°C of warming this century that scientists consider ‘safe’ for humanity, quick-cooling options look increasingly attractive. Deflecting the sun’s energy back into space would do nothing to counteract the ocean acidification effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide – which I’ll come to later – but it is a valuable way of buying time while societies decarbonise, adapt to warmer conditions and new climates, and figure out an effective and efficient way of removing the carbon dioxide we’ve put into the atmosphere.
Some engineers are proposing erecting Earth-orbiting space mirrors that would bounce sunlight back out before it even enters our atmosphere. Terrestrial proposals include whitewashing roofs of houses and public buildings, planting lighter and more reflective crops (perhaps using genetically modified varieties), and covering deserts or ocean in reflective materials. With enough paint and willpower, strategic mountaintops could be sprayed white from the air, perhaps.
Since the 1980s, Almería in southern Spain has developed the greatest concentration of greenhouses in the world, covering 26,000 hectares. Dubbed the ‘sea of plastic’, this Anthropocene landscape is remarkable not only because Europe’s driest desert now produces millions of tonnes of fruit and vegetables, but also because the greenhouses reflect so much sunlight back into the atmosphere that they are actually cooling the province. While temperatures in the rest of Spain have climbed faster than the world average, meteorological observatories located in the plastic expanse have shown a decline of 0.3°C per decade.5 It turns out that the plastic acts like a mirror, reflecting sunlight back into the atmosphere before it can reach and heat up the ground. At a local level, the plastic greenhouses offset the global greenhouse effect.
More controversially, filling the atmosphere with airborne particulates would also cool the Earth by shading it from sunlight. This happens naturally after a volcano erupts, such as Pinatubo in 1991, which lowered global temperatures by more than half a degree for two years after the event.6 In the deep past, supervolcano eruptions threw the planet into ice ages, causing mass extinctions. The same effect, albeit on a far lesser scale, can also be seen on shipping lanes because ships typically burn heavy fuels that issue smoky sulphurous emissions that seed measurably colder airstreams across the oceans. Sulphur particles – like the ones found in the Asian brown haze pollution – have a shading effect that reduces the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface by as much as 15%, and are masking humanity’s warming by as much as 80%.
No one would suggest increasing industrial air pollution as a solution to global warming, of course; instead, engineers are looking at other atmospheric ways of reflecting the sun’s energy. Injecting salt particles into low-level, stratocumulus clouds could make them brighter and more reflective, providing a local cooling effect. Clouds of perfect reflectivity and altitude for this occur naturally in semi-permanent sheets in three places: off Chile–Peru, Namibia–Angola and North America. Jim Haywood, an expert on brown haze at the UK Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Research, has carried out modelling studies on the Chile–Peru stratocumulus clouds, which indicate that modifying the cloud would produce a significant cooling effect. However, modelling also reveals other potential consequences: spraying the West African clouds appears to reduce rainfall over the Amazon, which would be bad; spraying salt into the clouds off Chile seems to increase rainfall over arid Australia, which could be useful. British engineer and inventor Stephen Salter, who pioneered wave-energy technology, thinks that rather than focusing on the three main clouds, it would be better to monitor oceanic warming zones in strategic locations around the world and spray salty nuclei into the air above them to create cooling reflective clouds and help modify dangerous weather. ‘Typhoons like Haiyan [which devastated the Philippines in November 2013] could have been significantly dampened before it made landfall by spraying the cloud,’ Salter says. He has designed a fleet of floating towers that could pump seaspray into clouds to whiten them, and he calculates the total cost of deployment on a scale that reduced global temperatures by half a degree per year would be less than that of a single international climate conference.
Meanwhile, other scientists are looking at what effect sulphur particles would have if they were pumped tens of kilometres into the stratosphere, mimicking a volcanic eruption but on a lesser, though more long-term, scale. Their experiments, restricted so far to laboratories, are looking at how reflective of the sun’s heat different particles would be, and whether the cooling particles would have any unwanted side effects, such as destroying the ozone layer.
The changes humans have made to mountains in the Anthropocene have largely been driven by temperature or precipitation – both of which we still have the power to alter, whether by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions or by reducing the sun’s power to heat us. The Anthropocene could become a time of more nuanced climate change, where temperature and precipitation are modulated to humanity’s needs, where weather is planned. It’s an extraordinary idea.
Humans have always modified their environment – it is only because of our exquisitely adapted brain that we thrive worldwide, essentially by insulating ourselves against the natural environment. Whether we raise average global temperatures by two, four or even six degrees, enterprising members of our species will no doubt adapt successfully. Given centuries, the entire human population would likely manage to live comfortably under such conditions. The problem is that the rate at which we are warming the atmosphere is too rapid for humans to adapt. Nevertheless, the concept of artificially cooling the atmosphere is highly controversial, given the atmosphere is a global commons. Perhaps it is because the intent is so explicit; although humans are artificially warming the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions, the intent behind burning fossil fuels has always been to produce energy, not to warm the planet. Some argue that even research in this area should be banned because it implies intent to carry out the practice; others say that it draws effort away from climate-change mitigation – from decarbonising our energy production. But surely freedom of inquiry should be preserved – carrying out scientific research into whether something would work and what its consequences might be does not make a scientist an advocate for deployment, and there are scientific questions that need to be answered, such as the impact on rainfall, and whether or not it would even be technologically possible, before society can start to decide whether or not to deploy such techniques.
This new, Anthropocene field of geoengineering is a fascinating area of research and the scientists working in it are some of the most remarkable and thoughtful people I’ve encountered. It is eerily reminiscent of the atomic research carried out in the 1940s – today’s geoengineers are working at the cutting edge in an exciting, entirely new science, spending their lives making discoveries and designing amazingly powerful technologies that they fervently hope will never be deployed. Each speaks sincerely about the risks involved with deployment, and reiterates that slashing emissions of warming gases is the best way of dealing with the problem. There may be very real and serious consequences of using reflectors. Models indicate that cooling the northern hemisphere (to slow catastrophic ice melt in the Arctic) would slash rainfall in poor countries in the southern tropics; one solution would be to simultaneously deploy reflective coolants above the southern hemisphere. Another problem is the so-called ‘termination’ issue. In order to keep global temperatures down and counteract future warming, these reflectors would need to be sprayed continuously and perhaps in greater amounts. If the spraying programme was terminated, global temperatures would rise very suddenly by whole degrees – this would be much more dangerous for humanity than gradual global warming caused by our rise in emissions.
However, the predicament that humans currently find themselves in – facing catastrophic climate change and yet increasingly reliant on the fuels that exacerbate the problem – means that planetary cooling techniques are likely to be seriously considered. It is, after all, what humans have always done when presented with a challenge – engineer a way through it. Proponents of solar radiation management, such as Paul Crutzen, point out that they are simply mimicking volcanic activity and have the potential to quickly and cheaply reverse the warming effect of a doubled carbon dioxide concentration. And, since we already know what happens when a volcano erupts, it is arguably one of the safest methods – safer than the impacts of global warming, for example. The technique could be used continually to avoid catastrophic climate change, or in times of severe drought or heatwaves, hopefully under the auspices of an internationally agreed treaty. And, carefully deployed, such techniques could potentially maintain or bring back glaciers over entire mountain ranges. But, while the world ponders the feasibility, ethics and wisdom of global-scale cooling, Norphel and other architects of the mountains are devising practical and effective local solutions to a warming planet.
