The inconvenient truth is that Mount Hood’s glaciers are shrinking. Does something need to be done about this? What can be done?

Short of the daunting task of convincing the people of the world to burn less fuel, the options for preserving snow and ice in a warming world are limited. But there are options, and one of them, believe it or not, is the artificial glacier.

Portland State University Civil Engineering Instrument Technician Thomas Bennett first started looking into artificial glaciers six months ago after learning of the work of Chewang Norphel. Norphel is a retired civil engineer in India who has built a dozen artificial glaciers in the Himalayas using little more than rocks already in the landscape. Norphel’s work has saved precious water for high-country villagers reliant on glacier melt to sow their fields. And it has been done with very little environmental degradation, at minimal expense.

Rather than using large, fuel-burning, earth-moving machines to build the glaciers with concrete and asphalt, Norphel and his workers use sunlight, slope, shadows, average temp, mountain rocks, a little wire, and muscle.

“It’s a design with nature,” Bennett says of Norphel’s work in the Himalayas. “It’s minimal use, minimal disturbance. All he’s doing is altering when the water comes off the mountain.”

Norphel’s low-budget approach involves working with local farmers to build rock walls diverting water into low-elevation areas protected from winter sun and wind. Stone walls confine the water in place to allow it to freeze and expand.

Seems incredibly simple, but it has worked. Of the 12 artificial ice reservoirs Norphel and his team have built in Ladakh, India, the largest is 1,000 feet long by 150 feet wide, and four feet deep. Not huge, but big enough to provide water for a village of 700 people. And it only cost $2,000 to create.

Could a similar thing be done on the north side of Mount Hood?

That is the question Bennett and undergraduate PSU student Emily Smith are trying to answer. They have presented their ideas to the Hood River Watershed Group, and they are preparing upcoming presentations at PSU and Oregon State University, and for the U.S. Forest Service.

It isn’t hard to prove that Mount Hood’s glaciers are shrinking. Just reference the research of mountain hydroclimatology expert Ann Nolin of Oregon State University and you will find that Mount Hood’s glaciers declined by an average of 34 percent between 1907 and 2004. Mount Hood’s glaciers are also melting earlier in the season, which has implications for water storage and water quality, not to mention Mount Hood’s $150 million year-round skiing and snowboarding industry (emphasis on “year-round”).

Of course, every glacial mountain on the planet is facing the same predicament, and all this melting ice is leading to some pretty desperate initiatives, like snow-making machines that work even when the temperature is above freezing (used in the Sochi Olympics), German sprinkler systems to seed glaciers and huge blankets to protect them, even painting mountain rocks light colors in the Andes to cool them.

Timberline gets more sophisticated every year in its “snow-farming” techniques to squeeze maximum year-found use out of the Palmer Snowfield (formerly known as the Palmer Glacier). Meadows and Skibowl move tons of snow around with heavy machinery.

Bennett and Smith prefer the low-tech, naturalistic approach of Norphel. They plan to build up a large database of aerial photos to find the low-elevation spot on Mount Hood where snow lasts the longest, and to study underwater aquifers to better understand water flow. Bennett is particularly interested in Laurance Lake, at 3,000 feet on the northeast side of the mountain, downhill from Eliot Glacier and upstream from the Middle Fork of Hood River.

So far their ideas have been met with skepticism. The Mazamas refused to fund their feasibility research project after a member raised large objections to perceived environmental impacts. “She thought that we were going to deface Mount Hood, which is the last thing we would ever want to do,” says Bennett.

A recent forum in Hood River also brought criticism from the audience. But Bennett chalks up most of the objections to simple misunderstandings.

Skepticism or not, Bennett and Smith plan to continue their research into artificial glaciers on Mount Hood, and they are welcoming ideas from the community as they delve deeper into the specifics.

What do you think?

Last modified: May 2, 2014