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The Conservacion Patagonica team

What triples the volume of an already massive river?  The Baker already lays claims to many superlatives: largest river by volume in Chile, draining from Lago General Carrera, the second largest lake in South America, and from the Northern Patagonian Ice Field, one of the largest extrapolar ice fields in the world.  In the last five years, it has become the subject of the largest environmental fight in Chile’s history: the debate over HidroAysen’s plan to erect mega hydroelectric dams.

On January 27^th, three Bakers-worth of water charged down the river as its flow rocketed 3,746 cubic meters per second (132,288 cubic feet per second) from a normal flow of around 1,200 m3/s (42,377 Ft3/s).   The flood-stage volume exceeded the average flow of many of the world’s largest rivers: the Nile, the Missouri, the Yellow River of China, the Rhine.  For most of a day, the Baker was running at five times the volume of the Hudson River in New York.

 Where did this tsunami of water come from? For now, no industrial human interference.  On January 25^th, a glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) began at the Cachet 2 lake, a vast, two-square-mile glacial lake in the Baker watershed.   This lake drains from the Colonia Glacier, perpetually rising and falling according to the melt rate of the glacier and surrounding ice field.  At certain moments, however, an accelerating melt rate raises water pressure and puts great stress on the ice dam that forms the end of the lake.  Water forms a channel underneath the ice dam and into the Colonia River below.  The initial trickle grows exponentially in volume, until the ice dam gives way to the stress.  Within a matter of hours, the entire lake—all 200 million cubic meters of it—dump out, like water rushing down the bathtub drain.

The water of Cachet 2 then travels a brief way down the Colonia River before joining the Baker River.  For several hours, the supercharged volume of the Colonia River pushes the Baker upstream at the point of confluence as it floods out in all directions.  Some of us drove out through the Colonia Valley to see the effects: water covering farms and roads, and the river spilling over its banks.  We visited the farm of the parents of park guard Daniel Velasquez, where high water had flooded bridges.  Thanks to a radio-based early alert system, they had moved their livestock to higher group and so suffered few major losses from the flood.

The history of GLOFs in the Baker watershed tells a frightening tale even for a climate change skeptic.  Historical records show periodic GLOFs in the area.   Prior to 2008, however, the last recorded GLOF in the Baker watershed occurred four decades ago.  Since 2008, six GLOFs have rocked the Baker.  Scientists have well documented the accelerated melt rate of Patagonia’s glaciers, whose extrapolar location makes them particularly sensitive to small variations in climate patterns. At the 2010 climate change talks in Cancún, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report on mountain glaciers, stating that glaciers on Argentine and Chilean Patagonia are “losing mass faster and for longer than glaciers in other parts of the world.”

The increasing instability of the Baker river system raises yet another serious technical difficulty with the HidroAysen dam project.  Even a large dam would struggle to withstand the added stress of a triple-volume of river.   Moreover, GLOFs transport large volumes of glacial sediment downstream, which adds further stress to the dam system.  While the natural breakage of an ice dam on Cachet 2 brings major floods to the area downstream, the failure of an immense manmade reservoir on the Baker would wreck havoc many times worse.  As the Patagonia Sin Represas movement has demonstrated, HidroAysen paid little attention to the risks of GLOFs in their original project design.   Our systematic critique of the company’s environmental impact statement highlighted this flaw, but HidroAysen has failed so far to give an adequate response.

Seven years into the campaign to save Patagonia’s rivers, the spectacle of the engorged and unpredictable Baker returned us to the wildest of a wild river.  No scheduled release determined its volume and no reservoir caught the glacial outflow.  Among the many reasons to oppose the dam project, the spiritual value of a wild river is one of the more difficult to price and evaluate.  Yet spending time with the dynamic Baker produces an undeniable expansion of the imagination and spirit.

For more information in Spanish, see this article.

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“An elegant animal in a state of nature, with a long slender neck and fine legs.”

–Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle

Travel through the Aysen Region of Chile and then enter the Patagonia National Park project.  Chances are, you’ll note two big changes: no fences, and lots of guanacos.  Since we removed the livestock from the former Estancia Valle Chacabuco, herds of guanacos—over 2,500 in total–have returned to prime habitat throughout the valley.  Our hardy volunteers have removed much of the ranch fencing, so guanacos can gallop freely across the landscape.

Members of the camelid family, guanacos are the southern relative of the llama—and both of them are South American cousins to true camels. These animals live in arid, mountainous regions of Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.  The name guanaco comes from the Quechua word wanaku.  Although far more difficult to domesticate than llamas, guanacos have been hunted for meat, wool, and skins for centuries. Today, their population has dropped to around 500,000, with of 90% of that in the steppes of Argentina.

Guanacos have long slender necks and legs, which allow them to run up to 35 miles an hour.  Speed has proved a key adaptation for this herbivore: living in big grasslands, with no places to hide, makes running from predators the best escape.  Almost mountain-goatlike in their alpine agility, guanacos can speed up and down steep hillsides with ease.  Large, flexible sole pads provide them with excellent stability on rocky landscapes. A grown male guanaco can weigh close to 300 lbs.

Guanacos live in large herds, composed of one dominant male and numerous females and juveniles, called chulengos.  At about one year, male guanacos leave the family herd to join a bachelor herd of other young males. At about five years old, a male will then leave his bachelor pals to try to lead his own group of females. The dominant male tries to protect his females and juveniles at all times: he will either stand on guard or ensure that another herd member acts as the “sentinel,” looking out on a high ledge for predators.

These sentinels will use their loud vocal chords to alert their herd-mates to danger with an extremely, loud and high-pitched call. This call warns the other animals in the herd to flee, giving them a head start. Another survival tactic guanacos use is spitting on their aggressor, whether human or puma. It is unclear how effective spitting on a hungry puma would be, but it definitely discourages a curious human from getting too close.

Like all members of the camelid family, guanacos can survive on small amounts of water for extended periods of time. They obtain and store moisture from the plants they eat so they can go for days without water.  Guanacos are also well adapted to life at high altitudes.  A teaspoon of their blood has 68 million red blood cells—4x that of a human.  This density allows them to transmit sufficient oxygen around their bodies even in the low oxygen levels of high altitudes.

Learning facts about guanacos helps us understand the basics of guanaco behavior.  But what’s truly fun is spending some time observing a herd of guanacos grazing, socializing, and moving around.  Full of character and energy, these big-eyed animals can provide hours of entertainment, especially once you start making up your own explanations and theories about their curious behavior.  As we often say, “landscapes without wildlife are merely scenery.”

Dr. Stuart Pimm, conservation biologist and member of CP’s Science Advisory Board, speaks with CP Communications Director Nadine Lehner about his work at the future Patagonia National Park.  Listen to the interview above or read the transcription below. 

NADINE LEHNER: Hi, Stuart.  First, would you mind introducing yourself?

STUART PIMM: I am Stuart Pimm, and I am the Doris Duke Professor of Conservation at Duke University in North Carolina.

NL: You’re on the science advisory board. Can you describe how you see your role in that function?

SP: I’m a science advisor to Kris Tompkins and Conservacion Patagonica. This is a hugely exciting project – this is a brand new national park. Moreover it’s a national park that is being created out of a beat-up, degraded sheep farm. And it’s already an exciting place, and it’s going to chance dramatically in the years and decades to come; there are going to be many important scientific issues, and I’m just thrilled that I can do something to help.

NL: How did you first get involved in this project, and meet Doug and Kris?

SP: I’ve known Doug and Kris for a long time. They are, after all, icons: people who, as individuals, have done more for conserving that planet almost anybody else. They are really remarkable in their commitment to protecting land. I knew I needed to meet them; I knew I needed to spend more time with them. I took up an invitation that was offered at a scientific meeting where I saw them, and so I came down and immediately recognized that there were some quite serious scientific challenges that we have to address.

NL: You’ve worked mostly in tropical rainforests. What attracted you to work in a big grasslands park in Patagonia?

SP: You know, a lot of people say, what’s a nice tropical rainforest ecologist like you doing working in a cold, wet place like Patagonia? The answer is that we, humanity, have protected about 13% of the plaent, which is pretty good. But you know, we’ve only protected 3% of temperate grasslands. Temperate grasslands are so easy to destroy by converting them to cattle pastures, sheep pastures, so this project is internationally remarkable in that it’s protecting a temperate grassland. So that is what dragged me out of the heat and the humidity of the tropical forests to become involved in this very, very beautiful place.

NL: How does Conservacion Patagonica’s model of doing conservation differ from other organizations you’ve seen and worked with?

SP: One thing, obviously, is the scale. Many national parks, many protected areas around the world are really tiny. They create all sorts of ecological problems because they’re too small. And the vision of Conservacion Patagonica is to protect very, very large landscapes. They can do that here, it’s wonderful, it’s fantastic they can do it here. You know so there’s a chance to do it right, in a way that would be very difficult in some other parts of the world.

NL: Can you describe this new gigpan project you’re working on?

SP: Last year when I came down, I knew that the immediate problem was how to draw a baseline around an area of a million hectares. That’s not an easy thing to do. The scale is vast. In many parts of the world, you could do that with satellite imagery, high-definition satellite imagery, but this is not a part of the world that people want to take high-definition satellite images of. Then I came across this technology of the gigapan. What is does is to take an ordinary camera, put in on a mount, and then take hundreds of individual photographs. And then with a very clever piece of software, you stitch these things together – my computer is over there at the moment, stitching away – and when you do that, you have an image that is breathtakingly both large and detailed. Some of these images you could print them out, and they could be thirty feet long and five feet tall, and only then would you capture ever last bit of detail in them. With that, you can capture the scale of what’s going on, you can capture the detail of what’s going on, so that five, ten, twenty years from now, maybe fifty years from now, we’ll be able to understand the ecological changes that have taken place.

NL: Do you have any hypotheses of how climate change will affect this landscape?

SP: What we know about climate change is that these areas of the planet are changing the greatest amount. The far southern areas, the far northern areas. These places are getting warmer, they’re getting wetter, and that’s clearly going to make a huge difference. Tree lines may go up, glaciers may melt; lakes may get bigger, then again they may get smaller – there could be a lot of profound changes. And having that baseline will enable us to understand them.

NL: What do you enjoy most about spending time in the Chacabuco Valley?

SP: Well, first of all, spending time with Kris and all the wonderful people that she has here. It’s a real treat to be with people who care so passionately about this place. It’s also a wonderful, spectacular place.  You go over the bridge just behind the house here, and see this spectacular view of the Chacabuco Valley, with hundreds of guanacos out there. That is a peak experience.  It’s really a beautiful part of the world. It’s a thrill to play some very small part in helping preserve it for our children and grandchildren, for countless generations of Chileans and international visitors.

NL: What do you hope this park is like fifty years from now?

SP: I hope it’s brimming with wildlife; I hope it’s a place that inspires and excites people. That’s the vision of this park: that you could create special places, that you can bring degraded landscapes back and make them exciting, I think that will be an inspiration to the people generations hence, so that they can do more of the same.