Atacama: The Driest Desert on Earth

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the atacama desert and it's the driest desert on earth [Music] the atacama desert is located in southern peru and northern chile in terms of sheer size it's a long strip of land about 1 600 kilometers or a thousand miles long it's established to occupy about 105 000 square kilometers it's not quite a coastal desert but it is extremely close to the pacific ocean falling in the valley between the andes mountains to the east and the chilean coastal range to the west in southern peru the desert areas even stretch beyond the mountain range and to the coast these parts are increasingly recognized by the national geographic society and other reputable organizations as part of atacama the dueling mountain ranges play a huge part not only in atacama's geography and topography but also the reason why it's so dry in the first place the andes are the longest continuous range of mountains in the world running from venezuela all the way down to the southern tip of south america they have huge cultural and historical significance in south america particularly with the incan civilization the chilean coastal range or cordillera de la costa is a much more regional chain of smaller mountains but one that nonetheless plays an important role in atacama's infamy to really understand this desert you have to first understand the concept of a rain shadow in climatology a rain shadow is when a mountain range or even a particularly tall hill interferes with the basin's ability to receive rain imagine a rain cloud that tries to precipitate on an area but is blocked by a mountain peak one side would receive all of the precipitation growing lush vegetation on the wet slope the other side of the mountain however would consistently receive very little rainfall at all that's exactly the effect of the coastal range that's west of atacama storms blow in from the pacific but they mostly rain on the coastal side of the mountains the presence of the andes creates a double-sided rain shadow that leaves the region in a permanent state of dryness the driest portions of the desert receive less than one inch of rain per year which is only one of the many ways to describe the aridity of the region scientists love to study the land and moisture markers in the region one group of british scientists approximated that one riverbed has been dry for more than a hundred thousand years while another projected that the presence of evaporite means that generally arid conditions in the region have persisted for the last 200 million years in other words that's since the triassic period most scientists agree that it's the longest continuously arid region on earth there's another big reason why the atacama is so dry and that's the peru current also known as the humboldt current this is a cold current of water that naturally flows north up the western coast of south america whereas most tropical waters have high temperatures around 25 degrees celsius the humble's current is more like 15 degrees this is wonderful for fishing the humboldt waters are one of the liveliest areas for commercial fishing in the world but it also produces unusual climatological results when it interacts with typical pacific weather fronts the colder water is much less conductive for the creation of rain it's much more likely to produce coastal fog rather than a boisterous thunderstorm so in short conditions are rarely right for a good rain and even when they are a set of parallel mountains shield the area from receiving anything these twin forces aren't the best explanation for why there are some areas of the atacama desert where rainfall has literally never been recorded there's really only one or two other places on earth that can compete with atacama in terms of dryness and those are the polar deserts specifically the dry valleys in antarctica record zero rainfall and are whipped so dry from katabatic winds that there's not even any snow or ice in the area atacama's driest points rivaled the dry valleys near the south pole but since antarctica is not a true desert the title belt goes to everyone's favorite south american dry spot so yes atacama lives up to the hype in terms of dryness but its actual temperature might defy your initial expectations for a desert it might be a massively dry desert that's just south of the equator but the temperatures here are much more mediterranean than mojave the average summer day temperature is around 27 degrees celsius or 81 degrees fahrenheit and that falls down to 61 degrees at night in higher elevation portions of the region the mornings evenings and lights are actually moderately cool year-round and if you want that big new idea of yours to seem moderately cool it's time to consider building at a proper website using squarespace now two simple things maybe you've got an idea for a website or a business or a podcast something like that knocking around in your mind well two the only way to figure out if that's worth doing is to get it out 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get started with squarespace today go to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com forward slash geographics to save 10 of your first purchase of a website or a domain and let's get back to it so now that you know atacama is the driest desert on earth what if i told you that it's the driest place in the universe well okay so that's probably not actually true but the atacama desert is a unique enough ecosystem that it attracts wannabe cosmonauts from every corner of the earth as many 21st century scientists have turned their attention to life on mars the atacama desert has become a popular place to simulate martian terrain the thought process goes something like this if human scientists are ever going to find some semblance of life on a rugged arid rock like mars then earth's most parallel climate might serve as an effective proving ground scientists from all over the world particularly north america flock to chile to study and experiment in what is generally considered the most inhospitable portions of the atacama desert where annual rainfall is virtually non-existent most of the time scientists are looking for any sort of eukaryotic organism they're looking for microbial life at or below the surface and studying effective ways to detect those organisms nasa for example has a team called the atacama rover astrobiology drilling studies team which is usually referred to as the arad's team this group spends one month camping in the atacama desert every year testing rover equipment to look for microbes or other signs of life it's one way the nasa teams can test their rovers in a realistic alien environment without having to launch a 2 billion dollar test robot to explore a region 58 million miles away there are dozens of modern science tales involving the region here's another in 2018 a team of scientists led by washington state university researcher dirk schulz mccook studied how microbial life has adapted to life in the atacama desert publishing their results in a journal called proceedings of the national academy of sciences upon the group's initial visitation to the region in 2015 something started happening it rained schulz-mchook's research group happened to arrive at one of the only recorded times in history where the atacama received rainfall the group took careful soil samples observing the living activity within the ground years later they came back during a more typical period of sustained dryness and observed a more dormant period of soil life their data and observations from the atacama support a growing theory about life on mars that millions of years ago mars had large lakes and small oceans where life hypothetically could have existed since then the surface climate has become hyper-arid but it's possible that some extremely small form of life still exists under the surface given the status quo in the atacama desert schulz smackhook might have said it best it has always fascinated me to go to the places where people don't think anything could possibly survive and discover that life has somehow found a way to make it work jurassic park references aside our research tells us that if life can persist in earth's driest environment there is a good chance that it could be hanging in there on mars in a similar fashion but atacama isn't only popular with scientists who are looking to simulate martian terrain atacama is a very popular side for astronomical observations too and it's easy to understand why when you consider the region it's in between two mountain ranges which means there are plenty of opportunities to build at high altitude the air is dry and there is generally no cloud cover there's not much light pollution or radio interference because civilization and human impact on the immediate surrounding land is severely limited if you want to gaze out into the abyss of space there aren't five better places on earth atacama is heavily utilized by the european southern observatory group which has three major observatories in the area blessia paranal and llano dahinator observatory the latter in particular is a very significant facility in part because it hosts the alma international radio observatory in 2011 an international coalition of several factions including the u.s canada japan europe and chile teamed up to build a powerful radio astronomy telescope at this location which is located on a high plateau in the atacama desert alma which stands for atacama large millimeter array is a 1.4 billion dollar series of telescopes with an elevation higher than 5 000 kilometers or 3 miles alna was a key participant in the event horizon project that successfully captured and published the first ever pictures of a black hole in 2019 there's yet another reason why scientists love atacama mummies obviously egypt gets most of the publicity when talking about preserved human corpses but atacama is a sneaky good place for anthropologists archaeologists and all kinds of other wicked smartologists who find preserved corpses in ancient egypt mummification and embalming were just a part of the culture society believed that the body had to be preserved for a soul to pass on to the correct afterlife so egyptians developed a keen understanding of how to halt a human corpse from entering its normal decomposition process they would remove organs chemically treat corpses and do all other kinds of stuff in order to preserve the integrity of the body because under normal conditions a body will invariably rot however we all know that atacama is special and it's utter lack of humidity and moisture means that in some cases corpses never ever rot they're naturally mummified this makes atacama a great place to find perfectly preserved bodies this phenomenon was most recently in the news in 2018 a tiny mummified skeleton had been discovered in the chilean portion of the atacama desert and a growing number of locals reddit users and area 51 chasers believed the skeleton to be that of an alien thanks in part to a 2013 extraterrestrial documentary that references the atacama desert as potentially proof of alien life in their defense i mean it does look pretty weird and if a martian actually did come to earth it would make sense that its remains were discovered in the one place that people literally use as a fake martian landscape but it wasn't an alien it was just a perfectly preserved skeleton with traces of european heritage suggesting that she lived within the last 500 years but it was only in 2018 that scientists confirmed the remains featured human dna the genetic material also provided an explanation for why the corpse seemed so alien in the first place when she was alive this particular human had a highly unusual combination of mutations that altered her bone development giving her fewer ribs enlarged eye sockets and a long pointy skull atacama has long been home to mummified corpses thanks to natural and artificial processes scientists have discovered naturally mummified atacama corpses that date back to 7000 bce the chinchoro people an ancient group who inhabited southern peru and northern chile also developed cultural mummification practices similar to the egyptians the first artificial chinchiro mummy dates to 5000 bc or 2 millennia before the first known egyptian mummy mummies aliens nasa camping trips astronomy towers atacama might be the driest desert in the world but it sounds like an awesomely unconventional tourist attraction but who would want to fly into a desert death trap like this well as it turns out a whole lot of people [Music] the forces of globalization have been a boon for the handful of local economies that do exist in the atacama region the popularization of eco-tourism in the late 20th century dramatically increased consumer interest in a region that historically speaking had struggled to support life of any kind prior to the 1900s atacama was sparsely settled but it did have one major economic advantage mining the twin mountain ranges and relatively undisturbed landscape made atacama the best place to mine potassium nitrate anywhere in the world potassium nitrate sometimes referred to as saltpeter is used in a lot of products as a chemical reagent even today historically though it's best known as a gunpowder oxidizer which meant atacama was a particularly valuable place to set up camp and mine raw materials various mining camps thrived throughout the region for generations all the way up until the development of synthetic nitrates in the early 20th century which obsoleted a lot of mining operations today the desert is littered with abandoned remains of more than 150 small mining camp towns even though they're ghost towns today the presence of these mining camps helped develop the small bits of desert culture that have sprung up along the outskirts of the driest place in the world in modern times mining operations aren't as lucrative but there are still a handful of towns in the area kopiyapo for instance is the capital of the atacama region which is one of the most sparsely populated of chile's 16 primary administrative divisions kopiapo shares a name with an adjacent valley and a river actually to be more precise it shares a name with an adjacent valley and river bed the river is completely dry now in part because of the effects of climate change but mostly just because coppeappo receives about half an inch of average annual rainfall and remember this isn't a neatly distributed half inch more like a bad two-inch storm every four to five years with unbearable stretches of dry weather in between in recent years copiapo has struggled with water scarcity because the town's series of wells have run dry the regional water utility drilled six new wells 180 meters deep hoping to find new access to the water table the results have been mixed the access to water has been greater but at those depths and at that proximity to the pacific ocean the water is often laced with salt and other minerals water purification tools are common household necessities for many local families still copiapo is a growing town the population was just north of 10 000 in 1907. barely a hundred years later it was pushing 160 000 that's because as dozens and dozens of phosphate mining towns folded throughout atacama capiapo was well positioned with a broader local operation that focused on copper and silver now as tourism interest in the area has exploded capiapo's economy is more diversified an increased hotel presence supports both chilean and international visitors who come to explore incan ruins desert mysteries and even a brand new casino another area that's even more popular with tourists is the small oasis town of san pedro de atacama this isn't a bustling locale like kopiapo the town sits high up on a plateau with a local population of less than 5000 people and its modern economy is primarily driven by international tourism visitors to saint pedro d'atacama often need a brief acclamation period upon arrival because of its altitude this is a village high up in the andes mountain at 2 400 metres 7 900 feet it's higher than mexico city and more than 1.5 times higher than denver colorado the air up there is very thin once visitors are acclimated though there are tons of potential activities amateur astronomy museum tours abandoned mine shaft tours indigenous crafting lessons geezers vantage points and dozens of hiking trails if you're looking for a good instagram opportunity atacama has some genuinely unique opportunities here including wait for it sand boarding and you cannot tell me that this doesn't look cool if you're looking for more unconventional transportation activities in the desert you can always check out the all-terrain motor races that take place out in the desert have you heard of the bonneville salt flats in the western united states well their southern cousin is the uni salt flats here in atacama which are the largest salt flats in the world both of them have seen plenty of all-terrain auto racing though we imagine it's probably an easier trip to utah or nevada with your souped-up desert speed racer than it is all the way down to northern chile oh let's not leave out the atacama race that's the volcano marathon which is a quick 26 mile jaunt on mostly dirt roads around the lascar volcano and it's not just an active volcano it's the most active volcano in the andes central volcanic zone but whether you're racing lava from an active volcano searching for a new vein of silver or uncovering a fresh mummy hidden away by centuries of sand dunes atacama is a unique location that's growing in popularity as an international destination for a reason there really is no place on this planet quite like it and the power of globalization is pulling more and more tourists towards an ultra-dry landscape with unique cultural sceneries you can keep buying plane tickets to some marco square and the statue of liberty if you like there's a reason the eiffel tower is a popular attraction but if you're looking for something that's a little more off the grid the atacama desert is definitely out of this world so i really hope you found that video interesting if you did please do hit that thumbs up button below don't forget to subscribe please do check out fantastic spots of squarespace as well linked to below and thank you for [Music] watching

Channel: Geographics

Views: 344,835

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Id: ubTIaXLpvOQ

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020