Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
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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.
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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