“Much of that water has to come from groundwater.” “This is literally the driest desert in the world,” Senner says. This fragile ecosystem is now in an existential conflict because lithium refinement ponds and other industrial mining processes use a massive amount of water - an estimated 400,000 liters per ton of lithium, says Nathan Senner, a population ecologist at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.Īnd there’s only so much water to go around. These ecologically sensitive “salares” nourish cyanobacteria and diatom algae, which in turn are eaten by three types of flamingos, half of the world’s flamingo species. One of the world’s richest deposits of lithium spans parts of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina, an area sometimes referred to as the “lithium triangle.” The region is also home to the Atacama Desert plateau, one of the driest places on Earth, and hosts a series of shallow, salt flat lake ecosystems that depend on the limited water supply. The new finding highlights that the quest for lithium is not without drawbacks, fitting into a growing body of research revealing lithium mining’s adverse impacts on ecosystems. Within the next decade or so, global demand for the metal is estimated to quadruple ( SN: 5/7 /19). Lithium, used in lightweight, rechargeable batteries for electric cars, smartphones and other items, is expected to play a major role in helping fight climate change. Mining of the metal and climate change together are causing the decline of two flamingo species found only on Andean plateaus, researchers report March 9 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Lithium mining appears to be a major threat to the iconic pink birds that rely on ecologically fragile salt flats bordering the high Andes Mountains. Flamingos may be a kind of canary in the coal mine when it comes to warning of a hidden cost of green technologies.
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