Sonam Wangchuk is an engineer, innovator, and an education reformist in Ladakh, India, and the Founding Director of the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL), which strives to rebuild the lost pride and self-confidence of the students of Ladakh through its educational reforms programme. Wangchuk also designed the SECMOL campus that runs completely on solar energy and uses no fossil fuels for cooking, lighting or heating.

Wangchuk is more recently famous for starting a project called the Ice Stupa in an effort to find a solution to the water crisis being faced by the farmers in the Himalayan foothills. The area is a desert, and receives a mere average of just 50mm of rainfall annually.

During the critical planting months of April and May, before the natural glacial melt waters start flowing, there was insufficient irrigation water and then when the glacial melt happened, it often caused flooding.

Wangchuk unveiled his first “ice stupa”, an artificial glacier that towered surreally over the otherwise arid landscape in 2014, for which he received a prestigious £80,000 innovation prize. He first built a two-story prototype of an ice stupa which could store roughly 150,000 litres of winter stream water that was not needed at the time.

The stupas have a conical shape which maximises the volume of ice that can be “grown” while minimising the surface area exposed to direct sunlight at the same time, resulting in a slower melt that released around 5,000 litres of water daily well into the springtime.

Devastating floods in 2015, when a landslide blocked the Phugtal River in Zanskar and formed a 15 km long lake that eventually burst its banks and destroyed 12 bridges and many fields, led Sonam to start applying ice stupa technique for disaster mitigation at high altitude glacier lakes; using siphon technique to drain the lake and water jet erosion to safely cut the edges.

His techniques worked so well that in late 2016, Sonam was invited by the president of Pontresina, near the winter sports resort town of St. Moritz, Switzerland to build ice stupas as an addition to their winter tourism attractions. Now that this prototype has been tested, the Swiss want to build more ice stupas in order to counter the fast-melting glaciers in the upper reaches of the Swiss mountains.

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