Build better ice towers for drinking water and irrigation
There’s a better way to build a glacier. During winter in India’s mountainous Lakh region, some farmers use pipes and sprinklers to construct building-sized cones of ice. These towering, human made glaciers, called ice stops, slowly release water as they melt during the dry spring months for communities to drink or irrigate crops. But the pipes often freeze when conditions get too cold, stifling construction.
\Now, preliminary results show that an automated system can erect an ice stop while avoiding frozen pipes, using local weather data to control when and how much water is spouted. What’s more, the new system uses roughly a tenth the amount of water that the conventional method uses, researchers reported June 23 at the Frontiers in Hydrology meeting “This is one of the technological steps forward that we need to get this innovative idea to the point where it’s realistic as a solution,” says glaciologist Duncan Quincy of the University of Leeds in England who was not involved in the research. Automation could help communities build larger, longer-lasting ice stops that provide more water during dry
This is one of the technological steps forward that we need to get this innovative idea to the point where it’s realistic as a solution, says glaciologist Duncan Quincy of the University of Leeds in England, who was not involved in the research. Automation could help communities build larger, longer-lasting ice steps that provide more water during dry periods, he says.
Ice steps emerged in 2014 as a means for communities to cope with shrinking alpine glaciers due to human-caused climate change (SN: 5/29/19). Typically, high-mountain communities in India, Kyrgyzstan and Chile pipe glacial meltwater into gravity-driven fountains that sprinkle continuously in the winter. Cold air freezes the drizzle, creating frozen cones that can store millions of litters of water.
Tropical forests help cool the average global temperature by more than 1 degree Celsius, a new study finds. The effect stems largely from forests’ capacity to capture and store atmospheric carbon (SN: 11/18/21). But around one-third of that tropical cooling effect comes from several other processes, such as the release of water vapor and aerosols, researchers report March 24 in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.
“We tend to focus on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, but forests are not just carbon sponges,” says Deborah Lawrence, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. “It’s time to think about what else forests are doing for us besides just absorbing carbon dioxide.”
So,she and her colleagues analyzed how the complete deforestation of different regions would impact global temperatures, using data gathered from other studies. For instance, the researchers used forest biomass data to determine how much the release of carbon stored by those forests would warm the global temperature. They then compared those results with other studies’ estimates of how much the loss of other aspects of forests — such as evapotranspiration, uneven canopies and aerosol production — affected regional and global temperatures.
The researchers found that in forests at latitudes from around 50° S of the equator to 50° N, the primary way that forests influenced the global average temperature was through carbon sequestration. But those other cooling factors still played large roles.
Forests located from 30° N to 30° S provided alternative benefits that cool the planet by over 0.3 degrees C, about half as much cooling as carbon sequestration provided. And the bulk of that cooling, around 0.2 degrees C, came from forests in the core of the tropics (within 10° of the equator). Canopy topography generally provided the greatest cooling, followed by evapotranspiration
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