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Glaciers Under Threat by Mining in Chile

by bone-dry hills that reach up towards the towering ridges of the Andes. Some 5,000 meters above the valley, where the temperature is cold enough to capture the scarce rainfall, giant ancient glaciers blanket the landscape. Runoff water from these glaciers feeds the crystaline streams that nourish the fruit-bearing valleys below—the last fertile frontier on the fringe of the driest desert in the world, the Atacama. One of the many thousands of small farmers who depend on the region’s abundance, local distiller Eduardo Mulet, walks through his golden fields of grapes, pointing out the vines his great grandfather planted after immigrating to Chile from Spain a century ago. It’s the end of the harvest season, and in this valley of persistent sun, the leaves are already starting to shrivel with the beginning of the dry winter months. “These glaciers are what sustain us during dry years,” says Mulet. “Sometimes, we go three or four years without a drop of rain. So, my fear is that if they interfere with these glaciers, we’ll die as a valley.” Ever conscious of the delicate ecological conditions they face, many farmers in this valley are wary of the plans laid out in recent months by Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold. Barrick, the world’s third-largest gold producer, owns a broad swath of land here, and if its projections are correct, this area saddling the Chilean-Argentine border could be home to one of the largest gold reserves in the world. The Argentine side, where Barrick is completing construction of the Veladero mine site, has approximately 12 million reserve ounces of gold. The Chilean side—dubbed “Pascua Lama” by Barrick—is estimated to contain at least 17.6 million reserve ounces of gold and more than 600 million ounces of silver, as well as large reserves of copper and iron. The problem for Barrick is that their metallic treasure trove is buried beneath three huge glaciers. The company has spent the past 10 years developing a plan to build the 450meter-wide open-pit mine, with a monstrous investment of $1.5 billion dollars. The plan includes an ambitious proposal to “relocate” large portions of the glaciers: 70% of the Esperanza glacier, 4% of the Toro One glacier and 20% of the Toro Two. All told, these glaciers span approximately 24 hectares. The plan calls for moving roughly 10 hectares—about 25 acres—of that surface area, which amounts to 800,000 cubic meters of ice. How Barrick plans to achieve this feat is surprisingly low-tech. Their proposal involves 240-ton trucks that will use huge hydraulic shovels to break into the glaciers and scoop up the large chunks of ice. The glacier pieces will then be transported by truck between two and six kilometers away, to the larger Guanaco glacier, where they’ll be tacked onto its southern face (which gets the most shade in the Southern Hemisphere). “It’s too short a time for the ice to melt,” explains Jeffrey Schmok, a glaciologist and consultant with the international ground-engineering firm Golder Associates, who is advising Barrick on the projNACLA REPOR ON THE AMERICAS