Peru bores through Andes to water desert

[Judi Lynn]

Peru bores through Andes to water desert
Published: 8:52AM Friday April 05, 2013 Source: Reuters

Peru's Olmos Valley might be a desert now, with rare rains and rivers that trickle to life for just a few months a year, but a radical engineering solution for water scarcity could soon create an agricultural bonanza here.

Fresh water that now tumbles down the eastern flank of the Andes mountains to the Amazon basin and eventually the Atlantic Ocean will instead move west through the mountains to irrigate this patch of desert on Peru's coast. It will then drain into the Pacific Ocean.

The Herculean project to reverse the flow of water and realise a century-old dream is in many ways the most important water work ever in Peru. It could serve as a blueprint for the kind of construction projects needed to tackle worsening water scarcity.

Call it extreme engineering in the age of global warming.

"All of this will be green," said engineer Giovanni Palacios, looking out over miles of brown shrubbery at a
construction site he oversees for the Brazilian firm Odebrecht.

More:
http://tvnz.co.nz/technology-news/peru-bores-through-andes-water-desert-5395386

[shenmue]

1. Wow

Nice to read some promising stories once in a while.

[madrchsod]

2. call it a step towards killing the amazon

[Warpy]

3. Interesting

Is this part of the Atacama? It has been millions of years since much of that desert saw its last rain, not since Antarctica separated from South America and changed ocean currents and weather patterns along with them.

The soil there should be amazing. I know in my patch of US desert, once you add water out here, the yields are astonishing. The problem is the water. Once you have that, it's a lot easier than it was coaxing veg out of glacial moraine back in New England.

[happyslug]

5. Depends on how you define the Atacama,

Last edited Thu Apr 4, 2013, 09:23 PM - Edit history (1)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert



If you look at the above Map, Peru only has the Northern Part of the area within the WIDER definition of the Atacama. If you use the narrower definition (In yellow in the above Map), i.e restrict the definition to the area with the least water, NO.

The Atacama is thought to be the OLDEST desert in the world, about 20 million years old:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4437153.stm

[Judi Lynn]

4. Please see the post from DU'er Cleita re: this article, cross-posted in the Latin America forum:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/110812179#post1

(Cleita is very familiar with South America, having lived there, herself.)

[Nihil]

6. Looks like another major fail from the toolmonkeys ...

> Fresh water that now tumbles down the eastern flank of the Andes
> mountains to the Amazon basin and eventually the Atlantic Ocean
> will instead move west through the mountains to irrigate this
> patch of desert on Peru's coast.

Not satisfied with the usual foul-ups from diverting water around the same
approximate watershed areas, some genius now decides to blatantly steal
fresh water from an ecologically critical environment for the sole purpose
of irrigating a desert for profit.


> "All of this will be green,"

Unfortunately, it's supposed to be fucking *brown* and has had 20 million years
of evolutionary experience with this stable state of *desert*.


The sooner a major pandemic wipes out humanity the better.

[GliderGuider]

7. You know we're in the endgame when we do things like this...

...and everybody applauds. This and fracking are classic Hail-Mary desperation plays.

[eShirl]

8. like Bugs Bunny vs Blacque Jacque Shellacque

sacre bleu