Fog Harvesting Essay

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In places like the Atacama desert in South West America, there is very small amount of precipitation, in some places less than 1mm a year. Due to this problem technology has came up with a very ingenious method to harvest water from the fog that is produced from the Pacific Ocean. In the Atacama Desert the fog comes off of the Pacific Ocean and as it passes over the cold part of the Humboldt waters it gets cooled. Once the air has cooled it causes its capacity of water to decrease. When it reaches the coast line, the air is forced up into the coastal hills and here it is cooled down even more, until the moisture condenses and becomes fog. As technology has increased a great idea of fog harvesting has been developed. This takes place on the hillside of the fishing village, Chungungo, where a huge area of nets have been set up to collect water from the coastline as it rushes in off of the Pacific Ocean. The fog is harvested from the drops lets that form on nets on the hillside, the water that is collected goes into big troughs. The plastic troughs act like a guttering system, the water runs down big pipes and into a massive storage tank, 6km away at the foot of the hill, into the nearby village called Chungungo. The nets that collect the fog do a brilliant job as it is made out of a material that does not absorb the rain droplets. From the 100 fog harvesting nets since 1990, the fog produces about 170 litres of water a day. From the easy and simple technology of fog harvesting people in villages that don’t have to put up with limited supplies of poor quality water, they can now have clean fresh water every day and there is enough for everyone. People use it to wash with, water their plants with, drink and even grow vegetables. Since the fog harvesting net where completed there have been some maintenance problems. Some on visited Chungungo in 2001 and they found

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