60 Fun Facts About Atacama Desert

The Atacama is the driest non-polar place on Earth and also the world's largest example of which landscape type, named for what supplies its scant moisture?

Marine fog rolling in off the Pacific supplies the only moisture many of its plants ever get.

The desert runs along the Pacific coast of northern Chile in a strip roughly how long?

It covers about 105,000 square kilometres, rising to 128,000 if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are counted.

Which cold flow of Pacific water, moving north along the coast, reinforces the desert's extreme dryness?

The current chills the air above it, so moisture forms fog rather than rain clouds.

The desert sits in a two-sided rain shadow between the Andes and which other chain of mountains?

Together the ranges block moisture from both the Pacific and the Atlantic.

Roughly how much rain does the desert receive in an average year?

Some individual weather stations have never recorded rain at all.

Evidence suggests parts of the desert received no significant rainfall from 1570 until which year?

That is a dry spell of some 400 years.

What is the local name for the marine fog that supports lichens, algae and cacti in the desert?

Copiapoa cacti are among the plants that survive on its moisture alone.

The desert may be the oldest on Earth, with hyper-arid conditions dating back at least to which geological epoch?

Some evaporite formations suggest arid conditions have persisted in places for 200 million years.

In 2003 researchers repeated the life-detection tests of which Mars probes on soil from the Yungay area and found no signs of life?

NASA now uses the region to test instruments for future Mars missions.

The Chinchorro people of the coast made the world's oldest artificial mummies, predating Egypt's by up to how long?

The oldest deliberately preserved Chinchorro mummies date from around 5050 BC.

Chinchorro "black mummies" got their colour because the skin was painted with what?

Later red mummies were painted with ochre while the heads stayed black.

The Atacama Giant, about 119 metres tall on Cerro Unita, is the largest prehispanic example of what?

It is one of nearly 5,000 geoglyphs found in the region in recent decades.

The Atacameño people who lived in the interior before the Incas built fortified towns known by what name?

One stands a few kilometres from San Pedro de Atacama.

The desert's roughly 170 abandoned mining towns were mostly shut down after the German invention of what?

Chacabuco, Humberstone, Santa Laura, Pedro de Valdivia and María Elena are among the ghost towns left behind.

Humberstone and Santa Laura, made a World Heritage Site in 2005, were what kind of industrial site?

They were on the danger list until restoration got them removed in 2019.

Which country lost its entire coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific of 1879-1884?

It also lost the department of Litoral, and still presses its claim to the sea today.

The War of the Pacific is also known by what name, after a controversial export tax?

It is also called the Saltpeter War and the Nitrate War.

On 14 February 1879 Chilean forces occupied which port without resistance, triggering the war?

The town was mostly inhabited by Chilean miners; war was declared weeks later.

A 1929 compromise finally settled the war's northern border by giving Chile which of two disputed cities, while the other went to Peru?

Chile had seized it from Peru in 1880; Tacna went back to Peru.

The naval Battle of Iquique on 21 May 1879 is commemorated in Chile as which annual public holiday?

Captain Arturo Prat died leaping aboard the Peruvian ironclad Huáscar.

In December 1907 the Chilean Army fired on striking nitrate miners and their families gathered at the Santa María School in Iquique; which folk group recorded a 1970 cantata about it?

General Roberto Silva Renard commanded the troops.

Chuquicamata, near Calama, is the world's largest open-pit copper mine by excavated volume; which US mine is the only one deeper?

Chuqui's pit is about 850 metres deep.

The "Copper Man", a mummified miner found at Chuquicamata in 1899, dates from about which year?

It shows copper was being dug at Chuqui more than a thousand years before the industrial mine opened.

Which Atacama mine has been Chile's most productive copper mine every year since 1996?

In some years it produces more than double the next largest mine.

How many days were the 33 miners of the San José mine trapped underground in 2010?

The cave-in came on 5 August and the last man surfaced on 13 October.

Seventeen days after the 2010 cave-in, how did the trapped miners first tell the surface they were alive?

The note read "Estamos bien en el Refugio los 33".

Which shift foreman organised the trapped miners and their rations in 2010?

Supplies meant for a couple of days were stretched to two weeks.

The Copiapó-Caldera railway, opened in 1850, was the first railway on which continent?

Its first section opened on 4 July in honour of the American businessman William Wheelwright who built it.

Which motorsport event raced through the desert's dunes near Copiapó each year from 2009 to 2012?

It was organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation after leaving Africa.

ALMA, on the 5,000-metre Chajnantor plateau, is an array of how many radio antennas?

It observes at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths and has been fully operational since 2013.

The Very Large Telescope at Paranal is made up of how many separate 8.2-metre telescopes?

They can be combined as an interferometer, and are joined on the mountain by the VISTA and VST survey telescopes.

The Residencia, the staff hotel at Paranal Observatory, appeared in which James Bond film?

It served as the villain's desert eco-hotel in the 2008 film.

How wide is the Extremely Large Telescope's segmented mirror on Cerro Armazones?

It is designed to gather about 100 million times more light than the human eye.

Which observatory, inaugurated by President Frei in 1969, was the European Southern Observatory's first site in Chile?

Its 3.6-metre telescope later hosted HARPS, a leading exoplanet-hunting instrument.

Scientists tested a prototype of what in the Valle de la Luna near San Pedro de Atacama because of its forbidding terrain?

The valley was declared a Nature Sanctuary in 1982 for its lunar landscape.

The Salar de Atacama, Chile's largest salt flat, is a major source of which metal found in its brines?

Only Uyuni and Salinas Grandes, across the Andes, are bigger salt flats.

The metal in the Salar de Atacama's brines was found in 1962 by the Anaconda Company while it was searching for what?

The copper miner needed water for its operations, not a new product.

El Tatio, a geyser field at 4,320 metres, is the largest in the Southern Hemisphere and ranks where in the world?

It holds about 8% of all the geysers on Earth.

Licancabur, the near-perfect cone that towers over San Pedro de Atacama, rises to roughly what height?

Its summit crater holds a lake that is among the highest in the world.

Ojos del Salado, at 6,893 metres the tallest volcano on Earth, is also home to what?

It is the second-highest summit of the Andes after Aconcagua.

Ash from the April 1993 eruption of Lascar, northern Chile's most active volcano, fell as far away as which city?

Records of its eruptions go back to 1848.

How many flamingo species live in Chile's Los Flamencos National Reserve?

The Andean, Chilean and James's flamingos all breed on its salt lagoons.

The Andean flamingo of the high salt lakes is the only flamingo species with what feature?

It is also the only flamingo whose feet lack a hind toe.

Which seabird lives year-round on the desert coast, nesting in cliffs above the ocean?

It burrows into guano to nest and shares the central Chilean coast with the Magellanic penguin.

The llareta, a dense cushion plant of the high Andes, grows about 1.5 cm a year, making many specimens older than how many years?

Miners once burned it as fuel, which is why it is now endangered.

The tamarugo tree of the Pampa del Tamarugal survives by rooting down to groundwater as deep as roughly what?

It can also pull moisture from the air and release it into the soil around its roots.

In rare wet years such as 2015, the southern desert bursts into bloom between September and November in an event known as what?

More than 500 plant species have been recorded within the desert.

The desert has become a dumping ground for an estimated 39,000 tonnes a year of what?

In the dry air the piles barely decompose, and fires have exposed nearby residents to smoke.

Who sculpted the Mano del Desierto, the giant hand rising from the sand beside the Pan-American Highway?

The 11-metre concrete hand was inaugurated in 1992 and references the abuses of the Pinochet years.

"Ata", a 15 cm skeleton found in 2003 near the ghost town of La Noria and touted as an alien, was shown by DNA analysis to be what?

Its removal from Chile and treatment as a curiosity prompted calls for repatriation.

Chile's longest river, which crosses the desert through Calama, is called what?

At 440 km it is the desert's main watercourse, rising on the altiplano and reaching the Pacific.

The oasis town of Pica is famous for its small, unusually acidic what?

The town lies 4 km from the oasis village of Matilla and its wells once fed 23 irrigation tunnels.

The desert stood in for Mars in which 2004 BBC television series?

Its soil is close enough to Martian regolith that NASA tests instruments there.

The coastal fog that waters the desert's lomas has a Peruvian equivalent called what?

Its droplets are too fine to fall as rain, so villages have harvested it with nets since 1985.

Besides copper and nitrates, the desert is the world's largest source of minerals bearing which element?

Some areas have concentrations hundreds of times the crustal average.

Under Spanish rule, the desert's coastal towns grew as ports shipping silver from which great mining centre?

At the end of the 18th century Carlos IV fixed the southern border of the Viceroyalty of Peru on this coast.

At roughly what altitude does San Pedro de Atacama, the desert's main tourist base, sit?

Most visitors to the desert stay there; it ranks among Chile's top three tourist destinations.

Which relative of the chinchilla inhabits the less arid parts of the Atacama?

Other mammals include Darwin's leaf-eared mouse and the South American gray fox, with guanacos and vicuñas grazing higher up.

Which 2008 Mars lander detected perchlorates, salts also found in the Atacama's nitrate deposits?

Because Atacama nitrates with perchlorates have held organics, some argue Martian perchlorates need not rule out signs of life.

How many people were killed by mudflows after unusual rain hit Antofagasta and Taltal in June 1991?

Rain reached inland as far as Calama; in 2012 the altiplano winter also brought floods to San Pedro de Atacama.