You could be forgiven for thinking there’s no water in the Atacama Desert. In fact, the driest desert on Earth has underground springs that feed the Chaxa, Cejar and Tebenquiche lagoons, as well as other bodies of water, providing oases for various animals such as flamingos and extremophiles.

It’s said that the ancestors of the Indigenous Lickanantay people practiced agriculture here without damaging the fragile ecosystem, using only the water deposited in irrigation channels, in a method known by locals as “sowing water.” The Lickanantay have built a unique cosmovision around the water cycle or Puri in the Kunza language.

“They know how to live with its scarcity, tame it and even sometimes fear it,” says Oriana Mora, an Indigenous Atacameño, in a study she carried out while at the University of Seville in Spain. It’s no coincidence that one of their most important ceremonies, the Talatur, consists of cleaning out the canals so that the water can flow freely, she says.

However, the Lickanantay are not the only ones interested in the natural resources of the Atacama Desert: the lithium industry is too. The two mining companies operating in the region extract more than 63 billion liters (17 billion gallons) of brine per year from deep beneath the desert, a rate of nearly 2,000 liters per second, or 525 gallons per second. The industry also consumes a significant amount of freshwater.

This prompted researchers at the University of Chile to look at satellite images of the region dating back to 2019. Their analysis revealed the appearance of deformations in the middle of the Atacama salt flat, where the mining is concentrated. Joaquín Castillo, a master’s degree student at the University of Chile and co-author of a 2024 paper that details the findings, says the “lithium boom” has caused the land on which the salt flat sits to sink or subside. The boom began in 2015 and peaked between 2020 and 2022; during those years, extraction of lithium carbonate doubled.

Based on this research, the Council of Atacameño Peoples (CPA), an association that represents 18 Indigenous communities, filed a complaint for environmental damage with the Superintendency of the Environment, the Chilean government’s environmental regulator.

The findings of the study not only contradict the mining companies’ statements, but could lead to a review of their environmental permits “by virtue of aspects that the environmental assessment failed to observe or take into consideration,” says Sergio Chamorro, a lawyer and legal adviser to the CPA. The objective of the legal complaint, according to Chamorro, is to monitor and sanction those responsible for causing the subsidence.

“It’s not a natural process but the result of human intervention,” he adds.

The memory of water

For the Lickanantay people, Puri is a spirit that can be found in the plains and wetlands of the salt flat. These water sources, or lagoons, form part of the community’s rituals. Ceremonies involving the collection of flamingo feathers, for example, take place on their banks.

“Puri is connected to these rituals. We have a totally different way of seeing the land, which does not coincide with the extractivist view,” says Mora, who’s also a researcher for the Lithium and Human Rights project of the Citizen Observatory, an organization dedicated to the defense, promotion and documentation of human rights.

Sonia Ramos Chocobar, an Indigenous Lickanantay and desert defender, says the basis of her people is the spiritual world, not the rational one. She says their spiritual vision allows them to survive in the desert, which in turn has enabled them to evolve and be very creative people, from the past to the present.

“This is why we live in the desert, because we are able to come up with an answer where one might not even exist,” she says.

Chocobar’s childhood was marked by the oral history passed down to her by her maternal grandmother, whom she describes as the last “Lickanantay nomad.” Her grandmother taught her the geography of the desert on foot; each year they walked several kilometers, observing the abundance of Puri. They always stopped in the region of Los Barros, where the water rises up out of the ground, mixing with the earth to form a rich layer of nutrients that they spread on their bodies, a cleansing and healing practice deeply connected to the Lickanantay’s cosmovision.

After her father died, Chocobar became responsible for looking after the lands of her ancestors. It was in this role in the mid-1990s that she noticed how the landscape of the Atacama salt flat had changed with the arrival of the mining companies. She says the industry expanded gradually, but because “we saw so much salt in the desert, we thought their work would be harmless.”

Over time, the word spread among the Indigenous communities living in the surrounding area that the lithium mining, which they referred to as “water mining,” appeared to be causing water stress.

Both Mora and Chocobar say neither the state nor the mining companies care about the deterioration of the salt flat ecosystem. Various studies, including the one carried out by the University of Chile researchers, have documented the declining health of the ecosystem. According to Chocobar, the Atacama salt flat is now “on death row.”

Research findings

Before Castillo’s study, there were no data showing land subsidence, he says. However, the findings of the study reveal subsidence in the area around the extraction wells of SQM and Albemarle, the only two lithium mining companies licensed to operate in Chile.

Between them, the companies have drilled 308 wells to extract brine, or saltwater, from which they then obtain lithium. The wells are distributed across the southwest sector, in the middle of the salt flat, which spans 1,700 square kilometers (660 square miles).

Using radar imaging, the team of researchers found the signs of subsidence are concentrated on an area of land measuring 8 by 6 kilometers (5 by 4 miles), corresponding with the area from which lithium is extracted. They also discovered the area was sinking at an annual rate of up to 2 centimeters, or nearly an inch.

Castillo attributes the sinking to the fact that groundwater stocks “are diminishing and not being replenished.” If more extraction wells are built, he warns, “the whole Atacama salt flat could sink.”

Francisco Mondaca, an environmental engineer and coordinator of the CPA’s environmental unit, says the companies must consider the study’s findings about land subsidence. The environmental unit, or UMA-CPA, works to monitor and protect the ecosystems of Lickanantay communities while respecting the culture of the Indigenous people.

“How do they define the current hydraulic parameters and hydrogeological levels of the salt flat?” Mondaca says. “Do these results change anything for them?”

UMA-CPA geologists Javier Escudero and Daniela García say their own investigations corroborate the findings of Castillo’s team. They also pinpoint the subsidence-impacted area to the location where the companies have extracted the most brine for lithium production.

Castillo says the sinking of land surface is a direct consequence of the compaction of the subsoil, which makes it less porous. If this happens, the soil loses its capacity to store water. In the event of rain, less water than usual will be absorbed into the ground, and more will run off and be lost.

Castillo says this would be “very dangerous” because it could cause a series of environmental and human problems, including the reduction of available water sources and even more subsidence. He cites similar phenomena documented in California, Mexico City, Iran and Israel.

“In all of these places,” Castillo says, “aquifers have lost their infiltration capacity.”

Escudero says that although the Atacama Desert sees low precipitation, the little rain that does fall, especially during the Altiplanic winter period of January and February, helps to replenish the salt flat. Rivers and streams that flow down from the surrounding mountains also contribute, “transporting meltwater and rainwater from the highlands,” he says. However, he notes that much of the groundwater is fossil water, accumulated over millennia.

A 2019 study describes the overexploitation of underground aquifers as a process of “slow draining” taking place in thousands of ecosystems all over the world. The authors warn that the extraction of groundwater has surpassed a critical ecological threshold, with nearly four in five watersheds globally exceeding this threshold by 2050.

“It’ll be interesting to replicate these analyses in salt flats that have yet to be exploited,” Mondaca, referring to Chile’s National Lithium Strategy, implemented by the government of President Gabriel Boric.

Albemarle, one of the two companies licensed to extract lithium in Chile, has denied there’s any “causal relationship” between groundwater extraction and land subsidence in the Atacama salt flat. “It’s also worth mentioning here that there are areas we operate in the Atacama salt flat where the surface has actually risen. We see this study as being consistent with our own commitment to sustainability,” it said in response to a request for comment.

The other company operating in the region, SQM, didn’t respond to our request for comment by the time this story was initially published.

Domino effect

Several portions of the Atacama salt flat are under government protection, including Los Flamencos National Reserve and Tebenquiche Lagoon Nature Sanctuary. The former is home to the three species of flamingos: Chilean flamingo (Phoenicopterus chilensis), Andean flamingo (Phoenicoparrus andinus) and James’s flamingo (Phoenicoparrus jamesi). The Andean flamingo is listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, while the other two species are considered near threatened.

The Tebenquiche sanctuary, meanwhile, comprises a high Andean wetland that corresponds to one of the Atacama salt flat’s largest bodies of brackish water. This ecosystem hosts extremophiles, microorganisms that have the capacity to withstand extremely alkaline and saline environments and high levels of ultraviolet radiation.

UMA-CPA geologist García says these areas aren’t affected by mining, “for the moment.” However, she says researchers should look into what would happen if the area of subsidence were to expand.

“We have to remember there’s a geological fault that runs through center of the salt flat, so it’s important to consider the role of this fault in the possible expansion of this area of subsidence,” she says.

Castillo, for his part, says the study serves as a warning to “be careful”: If brine is extracted from nearby these protected sites, the land there could also sink. He adds that the Atacama salt flat is a “unique ecosystem” as it’s connected to the eastern, southern and western edges of the desert.

For Chocobar, the Indigenous guardian, there’s little reason for optimism. Because the Lickanantay people conceive of everything around them “as one,” she says, it’s too late to prevent the damage to these protected areas.

 
Banner image: Puilar Lagoon is part of the Soncor hydrological system. The latter is a Ramsar site and also forms part of Los Flamencos National Reserve. Image courtesy of the Council of Atacameño Peoples.

This story was first published here in Spanish on Nov. 20, 2024.

Citations:

Mora Rodríguez, O., & Cayo Rivera, J. (2017). Una breve historia del agua, el bien natural de los lickanantay, defensa y amenazas en un contexto de administración-protección en el Salar de Atacama, en el norte de Chile. In Congreso El Extractivismo en América Latina: Dimensiones Económicas, Sociales, Políticas y Culturales, pp. 58-75. University of Seville. Retrieved from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Una-breve-historia-del-agua%2C-el-bien-natural-de-los-Rodríguez-Rivera/8bfdb7527985ee47cba1cbcc7df5ed8709ec4f52

Delgado, F., Shreve, T., Borgstrom, S., León-Ibáñez, P., Castillo, J., & Poland, M. (2024). A global assessment of SAOCOM-1 L-band Stripmap data for InSAR characterization of volcanic, tectonic, Cryospheric, and anthropogenic deformation. IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 62, 1-21. doi:10.1109/TGRS.2024.3423792

De Graaf, I. E., Gleeson, T., van Beek, L. P., Sutanudjaja, E. H., & Bierkens, M. F. (2019). Environmental flow limits to global groundwater pumping. Nature, 574(7776), 90-94. doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1594-4