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