Chile - EXPLORA 2007-2008
Fog Collection Educational Project

Current Status
The EXPLORA project is led by a group at the Catholic University of Chile, Institute of Geography, in Santiago, including Virginia Carter and Antonia Biggs. The goal is to educate young students in schools in the north of Chile on the important role that fog plays in providing water to their coastal ecosystems. This includes an appreciation of the plant, insect and animal life that is supported by the fog water. The students go by bus to the newly inaugurated Atacama Desert Center where they participate in field work and lectures. FogQuest agreed to play an important part in the EXPLORA project by funding and constructing a large fog collector (LFC), water storage tank, drip irrigation system, and small greenhouse. We were very fortunate to have received sponsorship for this effort from the Aurora Rotary Club in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada, and thank the members and the executive for their generous support. You can see the large fog collector in the video link provided. This one fog collector will provide about 300 liters of water a day for the demonstration garden, which includes one olive seedling, one orange seedling, six atriplex, five aloe vera, one alfalfa, and two pine trees. The idea is to show the young students, university students, and other visitors, what can be done by individuals in small projects or in larger projects that are scaled up to produce much more water from 10 or 100 LFCs. The site is at Alto Patache, which in turn is about 8 km from the coastal settlement of Chanavaya. As noted in another project description, we are discussing how we can assist the people of Chanavaya with a fog-water supply. The Aurora Rotary Club has agreed to help to get the Chanavaya project underway and we plan to move forward with it in 2008.

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