Harvesting Liquid Water in Fog - Part I

The water in the air, at any one time, is more than the water in all the rivers combined. Of this water in the air, 98 percent is in vapor form and just 2 percent is condensed into liquid droplets. These liquid droplets eventually form a cloud and through rain get deposited on the ground. Fog is a cloud which has its cloud base on the ground or just a few feet above ground.


Nature has always been a fog-catcher ... and people took advantage of it

California Redwood Trees (source: travels.com)

The California Redwood tree is highly adapted to harvest water from fog and satisfies the vast majority of its water needs this way. The trees simply stand like a barrier in the way of the fog that intercepts and precipitates the water droplets in the fog.


Water droplets from the fog collect on leaves and branches. grow larger and eventually drip down to the ground and nourish and plants and even create streams that animals and people can use.


On El Hierro, the smallest island of the Canary islands, people collected their only freshwater for thousands of years (till about a 100 years ago) from the leaves of their local trees - The roman author, Pliny The Elder, mentioned the Holy Fountain Tree growing on El Hierro.


In Oman, to capture water from the fog, there is a long tradition of farmers and breeders putting cisterns under agave, olive, laurel and juniper trees to collect  water dripping off their leaves and branches.

Fog Nets in Bellavista (Source: National Geographic.com)

In the hillside village called Bellavista, outside Lima city, the locals have put up 26-foot long plastic netting that capture fine droplets of water in the air, that eventually clump into large enough drops that fall to the ground and through pipes are collected in two underground tanks. The water that is not collected nourishes 700 trees that have been planted to reforest the landscape that logging wiped out years ago.


The residents of Bellavista are hopeful they will be as successful as Charles Darwin was when he planted seedlings, brought from botanic gardens in London, to make Ascension Island habitable, in the 1800s, for British troops stationed there.