Drying-up of Aculeo Lake (Chile)

The SERTIT team, member of the Theia ‘Mapping and Monitoring of Water Bodiess’ SEC used Sentinel-2 data to document the gradual disappearance of Lake Aculeo, near Santiago, Chile, between February 2016 and March 2019.

The 12 km2 lake, which was 12 km2 deep and 6 m deep in 2011, rapidly declined under the combined pressure of a long drought, tourism and real estate development on its shores and over-consumption of water from its tributaries by large agro-industrial plantations.

The lake level has been at zero since May 2018.