Lithium mining may be a major threat to flamingos in ecologically fragile salt flats bordering the high Andes Mountains.
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.
Senner and his colleagues found that since 1984, the five salares have each shrunk by at least 30 percent in surface area, partially due to increased evaporation, which is influenced by climatic factors like wind, humidity and temperature. The team also found that there’s a great deal of variability in water level between years. And those fluctuations appear to strongly dictate the number of flamingos in a given year by determining the availability of the birds’ food.
The team ties this decline directly to lithium mining. As the mining ponds grew in the Salar, nearby James’ and Andean flamingo populations dwindled in tight correlation. Water loss from new mining activity may be a major culprit. Between 1986 and 2018, the groundwater pumping for lithium production increased from zero to 1.8 cubic meters per second. Simultaneously, the Salar lost about five football fields’ worth of surface area every year.
“Science-based conservation management guidelines might still allow future preservation of some key hypersaline systems in the region,” says Mattia Saccò, an ecologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, who was not involved with the research.
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