By Paul Stewart for Mouth to Source

From the world’s coldest capital Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia where a typical winter temperature drops to a deep freezing minus 20C, a small group of researchers are studying a phenomenon known in local parlance as ‘Galan mos’ or ‘brilliant ice’.

In Russian where this ice form is somewhat better documented they are known as ‘Naleds’.

Robin Grayson, lead researcher with the EMI-ECOS Consortium explains, “Unlike glaciers and ice caps, naled ice shields do not need snow, and indeed grow better in arid regions such as the Central Asian Steppe and Gobi Desert. Naleds form in winter by a sheet of water flowing over ice and freezing. Repeated many times, an ice shield several metres thick can develop, often several hundred metres across and tens of kilometers long.”

What Robin and his team are hoping to develop are artificial naleds that can be cheaply produced by “pouring water on ice, allowing it to freeze, then pouring on another layer, and another, and so on. It’s as simple as that and far thicker than freezing a pond,” adds Grayson.

River ice in northernmost Canada is rarely as much as 2 metres thick, yet when converted to a naled it can be 4 to 5 metres thick. In Siberia the maximum thickness is 10-12 metres

Geologist measuring a thick naled ice shield formed near the Alaska Pipeline Route. (photo: C.E. Sloan and colleagues 1997, courtesy of US Geological Survey USGS)

These artificial, urban naleds would offset the warmer summer temperatures experienced due to climate change in and around Ulaanbaatar and the heat islands of high-latitude cities all across Siberia.

Surviving naleds in spring and early summer will provide vital cool microclimates and release a steady flow of meltwater, similar to glaciers, for natural irrigation of pastures and drinking water for nomads, livestock, wild mammals and birds.

Urban naled in winter

Summer from same location as above image

Ice shields have been viewed as problematic for the construction of roads, bridges, navigation and mining. Until now, the only advantages were in thickening Arctic Sea ice to allow oil rigs to drill without an offshore drilling platform or river ice to allow vehicles to cross safely.

Russian and American scientists and engineers have focused on the economic problems posed by thousands of naleds. And particularly on the technical difficulty in construction of the Baikal-Amur-Railway, the Trans Alaskan Pipeline and Alaska Highway.

Remarkably, the teams naled remote sensing was undertaken using high-definition satellite images from Google Earth. Download the KML here…

Initially, this covered Mongolia and Northern China and then was extended to cover Beijing, Tibet and the Central Asian States revealing hundreds of naturally occurring naleds.

“While ice shields are no surprise in Tibet to see ice near Beijing and in the middle of the Gobi Desert came as quite a shock,’’ adds Grayson.

Studies in 2002 by Vladimir Kotlyakov and Tatyana Khromova estimated naled ice shields cover a total area of 128,000km2 of Russian territory and contain about 94 km3 of ice, of which 45% are river naleds and 55% spring naleds.

The most famous, and possibly the largest permanent naled ice shield is the Ulakhan-Taryn on the Moma River in Yakutia, Siberia.

This naled ice shield is between 70 and 110 km2, between 5-7km wide and about 40km long

The ice is as much as 7 metres thick.

In the harsh climate of Siberia, like many in other permafrost regions, this ice shield is permanent and although diminishing, enough ice survives the short summer to await regeneration the following winter.

Vast areas of Mongolia have permafrost at the threshold of thawing and are likely to disappear over the next few decades.

Naled ice shields are known to trigger permafrost and artificial naleds could go some way to reversing the thaw and inhibit the release of greenhouse gases from peat beds and taiga or boreal forests.

The EMI-ECOS Consortium, of which Grayson is a member, are proposing the world’s first Cool Park, appropriately in the world’s coldest capital city.

They envisage Cool Parks ranging from an informal nature park on the fringes of a city for leisure and biodiversity, to a city centre Cool Park as an icon and centerpiece of sustainable urban development.

Ice creams and skating in the summer in Ulaanbataar never sounded so cool.

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