Cold Fix: Inside China’s Audacious Effort to Save a Dying Glacier

Glacier scientist Wang Feiteng has run the numbers, tracked the symptoms, and watched an ice sheet the size of 56 football fields shrink, year after year. Everything points to one outcome: without urgent intervention, the Dagu Glacier will be gone by 2029. “It’s like a patient with terminal cancer. No one can stop the inevitable,” the 45-year-old scientist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing, admits. “But as the doctor, can you just walk away?”

So he returns each year to the mountain in an act of stubborn defiance: wrapping parts of the glacier in white, heat-reflective fabric; spraying artificial snow into thinning air; trying techniques borrowed from ski resorts and Olympic venues — anything that might slow the melt long enough to matter.

“With the limited funding and resources, we can’t treat every patient,” says Wang, who helped develop artificial snow systems for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and now leads China’s most visible glacier project. “Dagu Glacier is one of the most famous. We treat it in the hope that it might create a ripple effect,” he says.

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