HydroAysén's Dam(n) Project Approved

Several decades ago, there was a pharaonic proposal to divert fresh water from Alaska, British Columbia and Alberta south into the arid Great Basin, California and Mexico. Called the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), this project would have turned the wild and scenic front range rivers of the Rocky Mountains into a series of hydroelectric reservoirs and pretty much ended the salmon fisheries along them. According to the late Luna Leopold, a Berkeley geology professor quoted in Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, “The environmental damage that would be caused by the damned thing can’t even be described. It could cause as much harm as all of the dam-building we have done in a hundred years.”

NAWAPA, fortunately, never came to fruition because, for some inexplicable reason, Canadians wouldn’t go along with the wholesale diversion of their water resources south of the border. NAWAPA’s South American counterpart, though, took a big step closer to completion last Monday when a 12-member government commission approved a series of five hydroelectric dams on the Baker and Pascua rivers (pictured above), in Chile’s remote northern Patagonian region of Aysén.

While the proposed HydroAysén dams would not ship water north to central Chile (which does suffer regular droughts), they would require more than 1,600 km (roughly 1,000 miles) of transmission lines through a densely forested region with only a single two-lane highway, most of which is unpaved. Those transmission lines would pass through several national parks and other environmentally sensitive protected areas, plus probable additional roads, and would result in major deforestation. On top of that, it still might require hundreds of kilometers of underwater transmission lines to intersect with Chile’s main power grid at the city of Puerto Montt.

Chile, admittedly, lacks most conventional energy alternatives other than hydroelectricity - it has virtually no fossil fuels and must import nearly all its oil, coal and natural gas from Argentina or by ocean-going tanker. Disruptions of the Argentine gas supplies, in particular, are notoriously frequent because of domestic political considerations on the other side of the Andes. Chileans are overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear energy in a country that’s no less seismically vulnerable than Japan - memories of last year’s 8.8 event are still vivid.

Chile does, though, have a potentially limitless supply of alternative energy in the northern Atacama desert region - solar power in a region that rarely receives any rain, and hardly even has any cloud cover. Whether that could be developed quickly enough to support the massive copper mining industry at sites like Chuquicamata is questionable, but Chile could do much more to promote energy efficiency - in the capital of Santiago and other cities, for instance, modern low-energy fluorescent light bulbs and insulation could do a great deal to reduce power consumption, at a far lower cost than shipping electricity nearly 3,000 km (about 1,800 miles to the north).

Opponents of HydroAysén, under the name of Patagonia sin Represas (Patagonia without Dams) are likely to appeal the commission’s decision and, in any event, the construction of transmission lines will undergo a separate environmental review in December. Still, spectacular riverscapes like the Baker-Nef confluence (pictured at top) remain in serious danger. The difference with NAWAPA is that, in a single country with a unitary political system, there are no Canadians who can veto the abuse of Patagonia's natural heritage.

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Raising the River: Iguazú Falls at Near Record Levels

On the South American continent, the mighty Amazon is the king of rivers, and too few people realize that the Río Paraná, which drains an area of nearly 2.6 million square km (almost a million square miles) in Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, is a worthy runner-up. Depending on which tributary is considered to be its source, its length is just short of 4,000 km (almost 2,500 miles) and perhaps almost 5,000 km (more than 3,000 miles). At its southern extremity, it joins the Río Uruguay to form the Río de la Plata (River Plate) estuary.

In Argentina, the biggest attraction in the Paraná drainage is the Cataratas del Iguazú, the world-famous waterfalls - more than 70 meters in height and two km across - that form part of the border with Brazil. The major reason for the establishment of national parks in both countries, they are at the moment an even bigger attraction: according to the Buenos Aires daily Clarín, heavy rains in the upper Río Iguazú basin (the Iguazú is a tributary of the Paraná) have multiplied the river’s normal flow tenfold to about 15,000 cubic meters per second. According to the newspaper’s correspondent, the water’s roar is deafening, and the river itself has turned red with sediments carried downstream.

As a sight, the Cataratas are always impressive - the falls draw more than a million visitors per year - and at present they must be truly awe-inspiring. Despite the river’s flow, the ten-day weather forecast is pretty good - neither too hot nor too wet - for seeing the falls. Only a little rain is predicted, as most of water is coming from beyond Argentina’s borders.

Because of the river’s size - the last time it carried this much water was nearly three years ago - this would be an ideal time to go; it’s also off-season, so accommodations prices should be lower than normal. But there’s one glitch: the flow has been so powerful that, for a few days at least, it’s eliminated access to the catwalk that leads to the Garganta del Diablo (pictured here), the single most impressive of the dozens of individual falls within the park. Park authorities expect to reopen the access within a few days, however.

For those fortunate enough to be able to see the falls soon, it makes sense to stay on the Argentine side, where the views of individual falls are more up close and personal - not to mention the bureaucratic nuisance of getting an expensive Brazilian visa for US, Canadian and Australian visitors (even more expensive if done in the Argentine border town of Puerto Iguazú, which has a Brazilian consulate. Brazil, unfortunately, inundated its own Iguazú, Sete Quedas, to create massive Itaipú hydroelectric project on the border with Paraguay. Also known as Guaira, Sete Quedas had an astonishing flow of 50,000 cubic meters per second, making it the world’s largest waterfall in terms of volume.

Mars, This is Atacama

Last week, according to the Washington Post and many other reports, NASA scientists detected water vapor on Mars. Almost simultaneously, NASA personnel exploring the Cordillera de la Sal (pictured here), near the Chilean town of San Pedro de Atacama, also announced the discovery of water while exploring a cave in one of the world's driest deserts. The latter expedition is in fact intended to have Martian applications - if water can support life here, so goes the thinking, it might also do so in Martian caverns.

According to expedition scientist J. Judson Wynne, the Atacama water was utterly unexpected: " Why was water there? Is this merely a phenomenon related to these caves in particular? Is there some sort of moisture sink that results in the water concentrating in certain caves and not others in the Atacama Desert?" I'm surprised, though, that Wynne was so surprised - in such a vast, thinly populated place as the Atacama, where settlements have always concentrated at oases, the water table is uneven, and distribution of the Pleistocene fossil water is irregular. There are likely other similar sites, but with access too poor to support human settlement. The Atacama still holds many more secrets than any single expedition is likely to discover.