In the Tian-Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan, villagers have made an artificial glacier to provide water for their drought-hit farms.
Standing on the ice hillock, farmer Erkinbek Kaldanov said he was optimistic about harnessing nature to counteract climate change.
“We won’t have any more problems with water,” said the farmer, who was worried for his sheep last year after some unusual temperature spikes.
Photo: AFP
“When the glacier melts, there will be enough water for the livestock and to water the land in Syn-Tash,” the surrounding district, he said.
The glacier is 5m tall and about 20m long. At the height of winter it was 12m tall.
Residents made it over two weeks in autumn by redirecting water from the peaks of Tian-Shan, which tower more than 4,000m high in northern Kyrgyzstan.
Kaldanov and others are being forced to adapt since natural glaciers in Central Asia — the main water source for the region — are slowly disappearing due to global warming.
A study in the journal Science last year predicted that the acceleration in the melting of the glaciers would peak only between 2035 and 2055.
The lack of snow, also due to higher temperatures, does not allow them to regenerate.
The extent of the problem can be seen in satellite images of Central Asia and in the regular warnings issued by the UN. It has a knock-on effect on the lowlands of Central Asia, in more arid countries like Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
This in turn feeds into existing tensions between the different countries, which still share water resources under a complex and obsolete scheme inherited from the Soviet era.
“There is less and less water every year. The water tables are emptying out, the springs are drying up and we have problems with grazing,” said Aidos Yzmanaliyev, a spokesman for the Syn-Tash farmers.
Finding solutions is urgent, particularly as farming represents about 10 percent of the fragile Kyrgyz economy and two-thirds of its inhabitants live in rural areas.
In the north of Kyrgyzstan, a country accustomed to revolutions and uprisings, the lack of water has already stoked social tensions in previous periods of drought.
“Our main aim is to provide water for livestock since the majority of the 8,400 inhabitants of the Syn-Tash district are farmers,” district chief Maksat Dzholdoshev said.
“We expect to create two or three additional artificial glaciers for farmland,” he said.
The idea and its implementation are relatively simple. Each glacier costs about 550,000 som (US$6,152) to create.
“The water comes from a mountain source 3km away through underground piping. It gushes out and freezes, forming a glacier,” Yzmanaliyev said.
Apart from providing water when it melts, the glacier also helps lower the ambient temperature and create humidity.
That “helps the surrounding vegetation, which is grazed by cattle from spring to autumn,” Yzmanaliyev said.
Artificial glaciers were first created in the Indian Himalayas in 2014 and have gone global — cropping up in Chile and Switzerland.
In Kyrgyzstan, their introduction was spearheaded by Abdilmalik Egemberdiyev, head of the National Pasture Users’ Association of Kyrgyzstan.
Egemberdiyev pointed to an additional benefit.
The glaciers allow farmers to keep livestock on spring pastures for longer before sending them to summer pastures, thus slowing soil erosion.
“We now have 24 artificial glaciers around the country and more still to be created,” he said.
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
The Chinese Embassy in Manila yesterday said it has filed a diplomatic protest against a Philippine Coast Guard spokesman over a social media post that included cartoonish images of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Jay Tarriela and an embassy official had been trading barbs since last week over issues concerning the disputed South China Sea. The crucial waterway, which Beijing claims historic rights to despite an international ruling that its assertion has no legal basis, has been the site of repeated clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels. Tarriela’s Facebook post on Wednesday included a photo of him giving a
ICE DISPUTE: The Trump administration has sought to paint Good as a ‘domestic terrorist,’ insisting that the agent who fatally shot her was acting in self-defense Thousands of demonstrators chanting the name of the woman killed by a US federal agent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, took to the city’s streets on Saturday, amid widespread anger at use of force in the immigration crackdown of US President Donald Trump. Organizers said more than 1,000 events were planned across the US under the slogan “ICE, Out for Good” — referring to the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is drawing growing opposition over its execution of Trump’s effort at mass deportations. The slogan is also a reference to Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother shot dead on Wednesday in her
RSS