The Nitrate Pampa: Opening up Trench after Blasting.
General View of Nitrate and Iodine Plant.
In 1908 the export amounted to more than 2,000,000 tons, increasing considerably after this time on account of the heavy buying of the European Central Powers, Germany and Austria taking together an average of 1,000,000 tons each year between 1909 and 1914. The position of nitrate in Chile’s economic life is illustrated by export figures for the last “normal” year, 1913. Total export values, 391,000,000 pesos: of this nitrate and iodine represented 311,000,000 pesos. Nitrate responded to war demands, after the first paralysis of shipping had passed, and in 1916 nearly 3,000,000 tons were exported for munitions manufacture to the Allies and the United States. The greatest purchasers of Chilean nitrate today are European and North American agricultural countries; Australia also finds this chemical of great value and, before the war, regularly exchanged it for coal cargoes.
South America herself probably presents the most extensive stretches of agricultural territory which make practically no use of nitrate. In Chile its use is almost non-existent, partly because the soil is too newly opened and rich to need a stimulus as yet, and partly because the moist southerly regions are considered unsuitable for the employment of the easily soluble salitre. Guano is the most popular fertiliser in Chile, especially in the north: its use follows old Inca custom, when such valleys as that of Arica were irrigated and fertilised to produce famous crops of maize, aji and cotton.
The Nitrate Pampas
No stranger country than that of the wide, golden-pink pampas where nitrate lies is to be found in the Americas. The circumstances that created the deposits, the rainless climate that preserved them for unknown centuries, are unparalleled; the belt upon the Chilean West Coast between 19° and 26° of south latitude contains the world’s sole source of naturally produced nitrate of soda. It is a unique region, and although the science of production of atmospheric nitrate advanced during the war, producers of the Chilean chemical do not view this competitor with alarm. Artificial processes are expensive; Chile can, if necessary, lower nitrate prices to meet any rival.
The coastal border of the great nitrate belt is about 450 miles in extent, its tawny dunes displaying no tree nor smallest green thing except in such rare spots as where a thread of water survives the burning sun and sand, or where, at a port, an artificial garden has been created with piped water. The generally waterless state of the region has long reduced it to sterility. None of the nitrate deposits lie upon the coast, or at a distance of less than fifteen miles inland. The average distance of the westerly margin of the deposits from the sea is about 45 miles, a few of the beds, however, lying as far as 100 miles inland. Between the salitre fields and the Pacific Ocean runs the diminished coastal range, dwindling here and there to nothing more than a straggling series of broken, rounded hillocks; to the east the deposits are guarded by the backbone of the Andes. The general altitude of the beds above sea level is from 2000 to 5000 feet.
The whole extent of the treeless and practically waterless country of North Chile, presenting a broad and tawny face to the unchanging blue sky, is a vast series of mineral deposits, for not only nitrate of sodium but also copper, borax, gypsum, cobalt, manganese, silver, and gold are spread through the great areas comprising the present provinces of Antofagasta, Tarapacá, Tacna and Atacama. Some of these minerals have been worked for centuries, but whatever small and more or less isolated deposits of nitrate exist in the two last-named regions remain unexploited: commercial production of the mineral is confined to the two great rich provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta.