Mongolian Ice Shield Planned to Cool Summer City

Mongolia has plans to construct a huge geo-engineered ice shield to cool its capital city during the summer. The urban glacier design foresees the use of vast ice blocks that slowly melt in the warmest months, streaming cooled water into the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator.

The main goals of this Mongolian geo-engineering project are to reduce the city's dependence on air conditioning and to supply a controlled water feed for farmers and residents alike.

Artificial naleds will be manufactured and layered up to produce the artificial glacier. Naturally-occurring naleds are formed when groundwater is discharged or when river water wells up behind ice dams, creating layered ice masses. ‘Naleds' are the Russian term for what the Germans call an ‘Aufeis', which literally means ‘ice on top'.

Mongolian Ice Shield

Those developing the Mongolian ice shield will duplicate this process by boring holes into ice flows at sites along the sacred, 700 kilometre-long Tuul River, which passes through northern and central Mongolia. In doing this, they'll allow water underneath ice that's already formed to establish another ice layer, on the surface, and do this again and again until a height of seven metres has been established.

This will be done during the winter and, by the summer, there will be a collection of ice blocks ready to be relocated into Ulan Bator.

Mongolian City-Cooling Project

According to the developers, if the Mongolian city-cooling project's successful, it could be replicated at locations across the Northern hemisphere. They'll need to be areas that experience extremely hot summer conditions and winter months where temperatures don't exceed minus five degrees, however.

"Everyone is panicking about melting glaciers and icecaps, but nobody has yet found a cheap, environmentally friendly alternative", geologist Robin Grayson - who's based in Mongolia - told The Guardian, adding: "If you know how to manipulate them, naled ice shields can repair permafrost and building cool parks in cities."

Enviro News will present further coverage of the Mongolian city-cooling project's unusual approach to geo-engineering in future News Items.

See also:

Geo-engineered Artificial Forests to Capture CO2