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. Indigenous defender Sonia Ramos Chocobar. Image courtesy of Sonia Ramos Chocobar. This prompted researchers at the University of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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