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Water from Thin Air

Water from Thin Air

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 Imagine you’re in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the driest nonpolar desert in the world. Understandably, you’re parched. So you head to the local watering hole…where you’re surprised to find a craft beer—made from fog. What? Deserts have little rain, but if they’re near the coast, they can have fog—which you may remember is just a cloud on the ground, water vapor condensing around particles in the air. In the Atacama, fogs often roll in from the Pacific, but the water droplets are too small to produce rain. So in the 1950’s, a professor began experimenting with ways to extract water from the cloud. Following his lead, the villagers of Peña Blanca have strung a series of nets in the mountains. Together, they condense more than 2,000 gallons of water from the fog each day, which is carried by aqueducts into the village. This water serves people, livestock, vegetable gardens—and an award-winning microbrewery. Their beers are famed for their light body, which some attribute to the lack of minerals in the cloud-borne water. Chilean researchers estimate that collecting just 4 percent of the water from the Atacama fog would meet the needs of all the communities in the desert, and that a 3-ft by 5-ft net could provide enough water for one person per day. For these reasons, villages in many countries are now building fog nets, and they could be an important source of water—and beer—in coastal deserts around the world.
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