
An artificial glacier growing in the desert (2017) - pseudolus
http://edition.cnn.com/style/article/ice-stupa-sonam-wangchuk/index.html
======
hadlock
Not really sure this counts as "an unprecedented icy structure"; there's been
a semi-sober alaskan ice climber, part of the "Alaskan Alpine Club" building
these every winter out of sprinkler parts and an old garden hose, appears to
be the same scale:

[http://alaskanalpineclub.org/old/IceTower/IceTowers.html](http://alaskanalpineclub.org/old/IceTower/IceTowers.html)

------
B2oka
Seems like one of the best low technologies I have seen so far

~~~
mogget
This is IMHO very much an example of "permaculture"-ish thinking, at least in
the original spirit of the philosophy.*

Studying and leveraging natural dynamics (e.g. the role the glaciers
previously played), paying attention to energetics (in the physical sense),
avoiding waste by clever system design (e.g. harvesting the gravitational
potential energy upstream that would otherwise be dissipated, volume/surface
ratio, etc).

For those who like this kind of thing, ref. also the returns on swaling dry
areas, Geoff Lawton's "Greening the Desert" work, Alan Savory's surprising
conclusions about the restorative value of animals in Africa, etc.

Anyhow, what a great story. Thanks to the OP for the point-out!

* I use original in terms of the older original work by Bill Mollison and Masanobu Fukuoka, who had a more general systems take on ethics. More modern interpretations tend to be more political and also come to some more limiting conclusions.

ETA examples and fix grammar

------
saagarjha
> But a cone has more desirable properties: "It has minimal exposed surface
> area for the volume of water it contains."

That would actually be a sphere. Cones are actually not that great, especially
if they’re tall.

~~~
IanCal
I'm not sure that's true. I think they're talking about how much they're in
the Sun and I think I can construct a single counter example, r=2 h=1 for the
cone, r=1 for the sphere should be the same volume. For light at 90 degrees
the area in the sun would be 2m^2 for the cone and pi m^2 for the sphere.

That's not a perfect calculation so I don't know where the limits are here but
I don't think they're talking strictly about surface area.

------
jtbayly
Does anybody know what has happened with this in the last two years? I'm
curious if they are successfully being used.

~~~
Retric
At the stated 150,000$ to irrigate 25 acres this is in no way viable.

At a guess this is generally viewed locally as rather pointless as you can
store far more water with a simple earthen dam. Basically, the hard part is
having water in the first place not storage.

In terms of efficiency, spraying water into dry winter air likely resulted in
quite a lot of evaporation. Further 150,000 liters of water sounds like a lot
but it’s about 1.5 inch of water across an acre. Which is why you would need
dozens if not hundreds of them per farm.

------
lolc
Wow, a snow lance powered by melting snow. It seems weird to me that
conditions should remain favorable long enough to build up a lot of ice.

~~~
jandrese
The reason this works is that it is only filling the gap between the end of
winter and when the glacier melt catches up. So you freeze water over the
winter, and then it melts in the spring to feed your newly planted crops. By
late spring the ice is all melted but that's fine because your normal source
of water is active again.

