A Buddhist man in India is fighting climate change with fake glaciers.

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Residents of Ladakh — a cold mountain desert between the Himalayas and the Kunlun mountains in northern India — were experiencing a water crisis as rising global temperatures began melting their only source of fresh water.

 

The remote Indian village, whose name means “land of high passes,” gets very little rain and experiences such extreme temperatures that, according to CNN, locals say it’s the only place where a man can sit in the sun with his feet in the shade and get a sunburn on his head and frostbite on his

 

Because of this, Ladakh relies on snow and glacial ice for fresh water, as well as irrigation for the crops that provide the locals with their primary source of income. But snowfall has become more rare and the natural glaciers have been shrinking, leaving the region with drier land and less fresh drinking water.

 

So Sonam Wangchuk, a local engineer, figured out how to make his own glaciers.

 

These “ice stupas,” which Wangchuck named after the Buddhist dome-like shrines that are popular throughout Asia, don’t need any power or pumps to work — just some pipes, gravity and cold temperatures.

 

“I once saw ice under a bridge in May and understood that it’s the sun that makes the ice melt, not ambient temperature,” he told CNN. ”I realized that ice can last a long time, even at low altitudes.”

 

The pipe is laid underground and connects a stream of water to the stupa. The water has to come from a source with an altitude of at least 200 feet. According to the laws of fluid dynamics, fluid in a system will always try to maintain its level. So water from 200 feet upstream will create a fountain 200 feet into the air from the downstream pipe.

 

Once the freezing air hits the fountain’s spray, it makes a cone of ice that melts a lot slower than other storage shapes — thereby storing plenty of fresh water for the village.

 

Wangchuk raised the $125,000 needed for the initial prototype through crowd-funding. In November, he won the Rolex Award for Enterprise receiving about $104,000 and an engraved watch.

 

He’ll soon be traveling to Peru to test larger models of the stupas during the southern hemisphere’s winter.