A retired Indian engineer has been working to nullify the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers by making new glaciers. Why didn’t anyone think of this before? 76 year-old Chewang Norphel, “The Iceman of Ladakh,” has built 12 glaciers already and hopes to make another five before he dies. His race against time is shared by Manmohan Singh, India’s prime minister who called on the region’s Himalayan nations, including China, Pakistan, Nepal and Bhutan, to form a united front to tackle glacial melting. And in case that doesn’t work, he’s trained a bunch of mini-Icemen to make glaciers on their own.

For anyone living near a massive reservoir of melting ice who wants to try this at home, here’s Norphel’s process: First you divert the melting ice from an existing glacier through a series of pipes into an artificial lake on the shaded side of a mountain valley. Then you build a dam and let the water freeze until summertime comes around, at which point you carefully direct the one million cubic feet of now-melting ice to irrigate farmland.

So far, Mr Norphel’s glaciers have been able to each store up to one million cubic feet of ice, which in turn can irrigate 200 hectares of farm land. For farmers, that can make the difference between crop failure and a bumper crop of more than 1,000 tons of wheat.