SANTIAGO, Chile — The world’s driest desert is expanding south — and sitting in its path is Chile’s capital.
Santiago, a city of 7 million people 622 miles from the Atacama desert, is experiencing its driest year since 1966. Similar to California’s situation with the Sierra Nevada, little to no snow has fallen in the Andes mountains that supply most of Santiago’s water.
“Climatic zones are shifting south,” University of Chile geography professor Francisco Ferrando said. “Santiago is likely to move to a condition of a desert or semi-desert. What is happening is probably associated with global warming, and there’s no sign of it slowing.”
Santiago need only look about 185 miles north to see how bad things can get as its drought continues for an eighth year amid record high global temperatures. Farmers in the once-fertile valleys of the Choapa and Limari rivers that lived for generations on agriculture are ripping up orchards, losing livestock and in some cases abandoning homes as wells dry and waterways slow to a trickle.
Near the origin of the Limari river, Paloma reservoir — Latin America’s largest for irrigation — is all but empty. Sluice gates are shut, the water that remains doesn’t reach the dam and most of the basin is dry, cracked earth. The image is repeated where Cogoti reservoir is empty.
Closer to Santiago, the Culimo dam is dry. Around the river valleys, fields are filled with the stumps of once-productive avocado trees and almond groves. Grapevines are a thatch of dried stems.
In search of water, or “blue gold,” Adolfo Cortes has drilled five boreholes on his 475-acre farm near Ovalle. None have produced any usable supplies.
After 25 years on the farm, Cortes has never seen anything like it. The 68-year-old has already ripped up acres of fruit trees and says the rest will be pulled if water levels in the Limari fall much further. “If it doesn’t rain in July, the year will be lost,” he said.
Since 2010, Santiago has received only a third of its average rainfall as the La Niña phenomenon blocked weather fronts from moving, said Jason Nicholls, a senior meteorologist with Accuweather Inc. La Niña may not be the only reason.
“You have to suspect something else is going on because (global warming) has been so persistent for so long,” he said.
