SANTIAGO, Chile – A lake in Chile has flourished for over two thousand years then climate change drought and pumping sapped it's waters down to dry lakebed.
The popular summer lake destination near Santiago, Chile called Laguna de Aculeo started drying up 5 years ago and by April 2019, all of the water was gone, replaced by a crust of dried mud and a blanket of green vegetation.
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The NOAA Landsat 8 satellite image has documented the change in water levels on February 26, 2014, and March 12, 2019.
In the 2019 image, the green within the lake is vegetation, not water.
Landsat 8 acquires a new image of the lake every 16 days. Its images show the lake dried out completely for the first time on April 10, 2018.
Water occasionally pooled in the lakebed in 2018, but it was dry for much of the summer.
The area has been in a significant drought since 2010.
Rene Garreaud, an Earth scientist at the Universidad de Chile, in Santiago says “This decade-long dry spell is unprecedented in the 20th century and very rare in the past 1000 years, according to tree-ring studies that make it possible to reconstruct past climate.
Garreaud estimates that about half of the water losses since 2010 are the result of the drought. The rest of the losses relate to irrigation and increased water consumption.