Atacama Desert
The driest place on Earth, a high Chilean desert where some places have never seen rain
The Atacama is the driest non-polar place on the planet, a strip of arid plateau pressed between the Pacific and the Andes along northern Chile. Across some 105,000 square kilometres, rainfall in its core is so vanishingly rare that certain weather stations have never recorded a drop, and some riverbeds are thought to have been dry for millions of years. The landscape, all cracked salt flats, gravel plains, and stark volcanic peaks, is so Mars-like that NASA tests its rovers here.
Two mountain barriers create this extreme aridity. The Andes to the east and the coastal range to the west cast a double rain shadow, blocking moisture from both the Atlantic and Pacific. A cold offshore current cools the air and suppresses rain along the coast, generating instead the camanchaca, a thick fog that some plants and lichens harvest to survive. The desert climbs from sea-level fog deserts to high salt flats and lagoons where flamingos feed, and its clear, dry, high-altitude skies make it among the finest places on Earth for astronomy.
For all its harshness, the Atacama has long sustained life. The Chinchorro people who lived along its coast practised mummification of their dead thousands of years before the Egyptians. The desert's nitrate deposits fuelled a fertiliser and explosives boom in the nineteenth century, leaving ghostly abandoned mining towns, and its copper, still mined on a colossal scale, remains central to Chile's economy. Vast telescopes now crown its peaks, peering into a universe revealed by the clearest skies anywhere.