Ice stupa
A Eisstupa (even ice-Stupa ) is a man-made cone of for storage of melt water to the water scarcity in the Himalayas to reduce -region. The name is derived from the word ice and the stupas that are characteristic of the Himalayan region.
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The water supply for the population in high dry areas depends largely on natural meltwater. Various factors such as current climate change , population growth and the rise in tourism are causing increasing water scarcity.
Ice stupas are ice reservoirs that are created by the vertical freezing of the meltwater on a wooden structure in the form of ice cones about 30 to 50 meters high. The water splashes out of a vertically attached pipe and freezes in a cone shape to ice. The construction is designed in such a way that the ice remains frozen until the sun slowly melts it in spring, thus increasing the water availability. About 10 million liters of water are stored per ice stupa. The amount is enough to irrigate about 10 hectares of land.
Indian engineer Sonam Wangchuk invented the ice stupa as part of the Students' Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh project and funded their tests with USD 125,000 that he had raised through crowdfunding . The first test began in January 2014. The inventor was awarded the Rolex Prize for Entrepreneurship in 2016 for this achievement . According to Wangchuk, the cost of supplying water with ice stupas is only about 5% of the cost of building a small reservoir .
geography
The first ice stupas arose in Ladakh . With an annual average of precipitation of less than 50 millimeters, the agriculture depends in Ladakh mainly by meltwater from the glacier from. In the region, the streams are still dry in spring or carry little water when the need for water for sowing increases; the larger amounts of meltwater from the glaciers only come later in the year.
Art objects
An ice stupa village was created in Pontresina in the Swiss canton of Graubünden in 2017. It serves as an art object for local tourism and is also intended to support the construction of ice stupas in arid regions.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Sourabh Maheshwary, Felix Raspall, Simant Verma: Optimized structure for Ice Stupa-architecture that supports nature to resist climate change. In: Proceedings of IASS Annual Symposia . Vol. 2019. No. 8. International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), 2019.
- ↑ a b Nina Strochlic: The "ice stupas" that could irrigate the Himalayas. In: National Geographic . March 12, 2018, accessed March 12, 2020 .
- ↑ Ian Cunningham: Ice Stupas: Water conservation in the land of the Buddha. In: www.indiawaterportal.org. September 30, 2015, accessed March 12, 2020 .
- ↑ An ice stupa village is being built near Pontresina. In: südostschweiz.ch. August 17, 2017, accessed March 12, 2020 .