To explain what’s going on requires an actual reading of the article, but a quick summary (as best as I understand) would be…

Villages in Pakistan near high altitudes need high altitude ice (glaciers and mountain ice) to build up over the winter, and slowly melt in the summer to provide water for farming and daily life.

Due to climate change, the ice on the mountains aren’t building up as much in the winter, and are melting too fast in the summer.

There is a tradition in those villages to move ice to higher altitudes on the mountain, and mix it with rock and coal. This does a few things, it provides a seed that captures rain and creates a foundation for the glaciers to form, and slows the melt so they build up bigger over time.

There seems to be some question about if this actually works, or if it’s just ritual, but since the claim is that it takes decades for the process to work, we don’t really have a lot of evidence either way yet.

These villages are losing members because they can’t farm anymore, this feels like a last ditch attempt based on old customs to get their way of life back. It’s unclear on the amount of physical effort vs. impact, but it would be interesting to see if this can be applied elsewhere.

So whilst the baby glacier idea has already been assessed as not working in the 90s, the ice stupas (TL;DR - water fountain in a shady mountain, sprays water to make a big pile of ice in winter - melts in summer for crop irrigation) seem pretty useful.

I’m sorry? Uh what the fuck ?