58 Fun Facts About Atacama Desert

Radio dishes high in the Atacama were part of the planet-wide telescope network that in 2019 revealed the first image of what?

A black hole showed up as a bright ring around a dark centre; eight radio telescopes from Spain to the South Pole worked as one Earth-sized telescope, and the recordings travelled on disks because there was too much data to send online.

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

The Humboldt Current chills the sea air, which then sits trapped under warmer air and cannot build rain clouds; the same cold upwelling feeds one of the world's richest fishing grounds beside one of its driest shores.

The Andes block moist air from the Amazon side, leaving the Atacama in what kind of sheltered zone?

A rain shadow forms where mountains force moist air to climb, cool and shed its rain on the windward slope, leaving almost none for the far side; a lower range along the shore screens the desert from the ocean as well.

Which climate event, every few years, warms the cold sea off the Atacama coast and can bring rare rain to the desert?

El Niño, 'the child', is said to have been named by fishermen for the Christ child, because the warm water tends to arrive around Christmas; it wrecks their catch, and rain can then soak ground that has been dry for years.

From 1903, a weather station on the Atacama coast recorded the longest rainless spell ever measured, lasting how long?

14 years: not a drop fell on the port between October 1903 and January 1918, the longest dry spell in the World Meteorological Organization's records; a child born there could turn 14 without seeing rain.

What do Chileans call the thick marine fog that keeps lichens and cacti alive on the Atacama coast?

Camanchaca rolls in off the Pacific but never turns to rain: its droplets are too fine to fall, so cacti take their water straight from the mist.

Which naturalist, riding through northern Chile in 1835, called the Atacama "a barrier far worse than the most turbulent ocean"?

Charles Darwin found the port of Iquique so dry that its drinking water came by boat from forty miles up the coast, and he paid threepence for a wine-bottle of it.

In a 2003 study, the life-detection tests of which NASA mission, run on Mars in 1976, found nothing alive in Atacama soil?

Viking's tests came up empty in the desert's driest core, where the soil holds only traces of organic matter and almost no bacteria, and where chemistry rather than microbes breaks organic compounds down.

The Chinchorro people of the Atacama coast made the world's oldest artificial mummies, about 2,000 years before which civilisation did?

The Egyptians usually kept elaborate mummification for the elite, but the Chinchorro preserved everyone, babies and even foetuses included, from about 5000 BC.

One theory says the Chinchorro began making mummies out of grief for infants killed by which poison, found naturally in their rivers?

Arsenic in the Camarones River runs at up to a hundred times the modern safety limit and causes miscarriages and early births, and the oldest mummy known is a child from that valley.

Laid out across a whole hillside, the Atacama Giant is the world's largest prehistoric human figure in which art form?

Geoglyph: the giant is drawn on the ground itself, and the rays on its head may have lined up with the moon to help its makers predict the desert's rainy season.

The Pukará de Quitor, a 12th-century hilltop ruin near San Pedro de Atacama, was built as what?

A fortress: it went up after the Tiwanaku state fell apart and the region's rival chiefdoms turned on one another, and its red stone walls still climb an 80-metre slope.

A mining boom that built whole towns in the Atacama collapsed after German chemists learned to make which product synthetically?

Fertiliser: the Haber-Bosch process, running at industrial scale by 1913, pulls nitrogen straight from the air, so the world stopped needing the mineral dug from the Atacama and its mining towns emptied.

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

Saltpeter works: the derelict buildings were so fragile that UNESCO put them on its danger list the same year it inscribed them, and restoration only got them off it in 2019.

Which country lost its entire coastline, a strip of the Atacama, to Chile in the War of the Pacific?

Bolivia founded a navy anyway in 1963, long after its coast was gone: it trains on Lake Titicaca some 3,800 metres up in the Andes, and the country marks the loss every 23 March, the Day of the Sea.

The War of the Pacific is nicknamed the Ten Cents War after which charge that set it off?

An export tax: in 1878 ten centavos were put on every quintal of mineral a Chilean company shipped, breaking a treaty that had promised no tax rises for 25 years.

Chilean troops set off the War of the Pacific in February 1879 by landing unopposed at which port?

Antofagasta was taken on the very day a Chilean mining company's seized assets were due to be auctioned, and nobody fought back because most of the town's residents were Chilean miners.

Under the 1929 treaty that returned Tacna to Peru, which neighbouring port city did Chile keep?

Arica stayed Chilean without the vote its people were promised: the 1883 peace deal set a plebiscite for ten years on, the two sides never agreed its terms, and the towns were simply split.

The Battle of Iquique of 21 May 1879 is remembered in Chile with which annual public holiday?

Navy Day honours a ship Chile lost: the wooden Esmeralda was rammed and sunk by the Peruvian ironclad Huáscar, and Captain Arturo Prat died leaping onto the enemy's deck.

The Atacama miners shot by troops at Iquique in 1907 had struck partly over being paid in what?

Company tokens bought goods only at the mine owner's own shop, so the strikers demanded real money; the army answered with rifles and machine guns at the Santa María School, killing miners, wives and children.

Which US copper mine is one of the few open pits on Earth deeper than the Atacama's Chuquicamata?

Bingham Canyon, Utah, is about 1.2 km deep; Chuquicamata's pit and waste heaps grew until dust and fumes forced its whole company town to move to Calama, leaving it abandoned by 2007.

As of 2024, which Chilean mine produced more copper than any other mine in the world?

Escondida means "hidden": the Atacama ore lay under hundreds of metres of barren rock with no sign at the surface, so geologists found it only by drilling blind along a line of known copper finds.

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

69 days, and for the first 17 nobody above knew they were alive: the men stretched emergency food meant for about two days across more than two weeks.

How did Chile's 33 trapped miners first tell rescuers they were all alive?

A note on a drill bit: when a probe broke through some 700 metres down, the men hammered on it and taped on a scrap reading "Estamos bien en el refugio los 33", all 33 of us are fine in the shelter.

Crews widening the Pan-American Highway through the Atacama exposed a graveyard of more than 40 fossil what?

Whales lay belly-up in four separate layers of rock, a sign that they died at sea and washed ashore in repeated mass strandings. Scientists think toxic algae poisoned them, as such blooms still kill sea mammals today.

Chile's first railway ran from Caldera in 1851 to which silver town, later known worldwide for the 2010 mine rescue?

Copiapó had grown rich on the Chañarcillo silver strike of 1832 and needed a way to the sea. The line's first locomotive, shipped from Philadelphia, was named after the town.

Which motorsport event began sending cars, bikes and trucks through the Atacama's dunes in 2009?

The Dakar Rally left Africa after fears of attacks in Mauritania cancelled its 2008 race. Chile and Argentina offered to host, and the event stayed in South America for a decade.

At ALMA, 5,000 metres up in the Atacama, the trucks that move the radio dishes have seats shaped to fit what?

An oxygen tank helps the driver breathe the thin air while steering a 28-wheel truck loaded with a 115-tonne dish. ALMA needs the height: lower down, water vapour would soak up the faint signals it collects.

The Very Large Telescope's four giant telescopes carry Mapuche names for the Sun, the Moon, Venus and which constellation?

The Southern Cross is Melipal in the Mapuche language, beside Antu the Sun, Kueyen the Moon and Yepun, Venus. The four 8.2-metre telescopes can also pool their light to work as one far sharper instrument.

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

Quantum of Solace made it the villain's desert hideout. The real building hides a tropical garden and a pool under its dome, so that astronomers coming off shift can breathe moist air.

How did engineers make room for the Extremely Large Telescope on top of Cerro Armazones in 2014?

Blasting the summit flat: the first explosion was streamed live in June 2014, and levelling the peak left a platform big enough for a telescope whose main mirror is 39 metres across.

In 2016, a telescope at La Silla, the European Southern Observatory's first site in Chile, found a planet circling which star?

Proxima Centauri is the star nearest the Sun: astronomers at La Silla, a mountain whose Spanish name means "the saddle", caught it wobbling to the pull of a planet.

In July 2011, Atacama copper mines shut when parts of the desert lay buried up to 80 cm deep in what?

Snow: a cold front from the Antarctic reached the driest desert on Earth and dumped up to 80 cm in a few days, on ground where a whole year can bring as little as 1 to 3 mm of rain.

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

Lithium comes up in brine pumped from beneath the crust, then sits in vast open ponds for about a year while the desert sun evaporates the water and leaves a concentrate rich enough to refine for batteries.

Geologists from the copper miner Anaconda found the Salar de Atacama's prized metal in 1962 while searching for what?

Fresh water for its Chuquicamata copper works was the goal. The geologists found none under the salt crust, only brine, and tests on that brine turned up the metal the basin is now mined for.

El Tatio, 4,320 metres up in the Andes above the Atacama, draws tour buses before dawn to a field of what?

Geysers: tours leave San Pedro de Atacama in the small hours because the freezing dawn air condenses El Tatio's steam into tall white columns, which thin out as the day warms.

What did Andean peoples, climbing for ceremonies centuries before mountaineers, leave at the summit of Licancabur volcano?

Stone shrines: a ceremonial platform and mortarless stone enclosures sit by the crater, 5,916 metres up, the work of the Inca or the local Atacameño. They hauled wood up too, and climbers have found it lying high on the mountain.

Ojos del Salado, Earth's tallest volcano, also holds what?

The highest lake on the planet is a permanent pool about 100 metres across, in a crater near the 6,893-metre summit of a mountain otherwise too arid to hold any real glaciers.

Ash from Lascar's April 1993 eruption in northern Chile crossed the Andes and fell on which city 1,500 km away?

Buenos Aires got a light dusting after the blast threw ash more than 20 km up and winds carried it across Argentina.

Which bird of the Atacama's salt lagoons was written off as extinct until a remote colony turned up in the 1950s?

James's flamingo turned up nesting in a mixed colony with Andean and Chilean flamingos, the two species it still shares these lagoons with. Its name honours Harry Berkeley James, a British businessman in Chile who paid bird collectors.

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

Yellow legs let birders pick the Andean flamingo out of a mixed flock, since the Chilean flamingos beside it have grey legs with pink joints. It shares one more oddity with its closest cousin: neither has a hind toe.

Which seabirds breed along the Atacama's desert coast, nesting on cliff tops and in burrows above the Pacific?

Penguins here like to dig their nest burrows into deep seabird guano. When miners stripped those deposits a century and more ago, the birds were pushed onto exposed rock, and their numbers fell steeply.

The oldest llaretas, dense green cushion plants of the high Andes, are estimated to be about how many years old?

3,000 years is the age given for the oldest llaretas, rock-hard relatives of parsley. Copper mines such as Chuquicamata once burned the plant as fuel, a harvest that growth this slow could never replace.

What does the tamarugo, a tree of the Atacama's central plain, rely on for water?

Deep groundwater keeps it alive: the tamarugo's roots reach a water table many metres below the salt crust. That makes wells a threat, because pumping for towns and mines has lowered the water table and the trees thin out as it sinks.

In rare wet years, what do Chileans call the spring spectacle that draws visitors to the southern Atacama?

Desierto florido, the flowering desert, happens when rare heavy rains wake seeds and bulbs that lie dormant in the sand between wet years. More than 200 species, most found nowhere else, flower between September and November.

In 2021, reporters found an estimated 39,000 tonnes a year of what being dumped in the Atacama outside Iquique?

Used clothing arrives by the shipload at Iquique's free-trade zone for resale across Latin America. What nobody buys is barred from the municipal landfills, so it ends up dumped in the desert.

Since 1992, what has risen 11 metres out of the sand beside the Pan-American Highway in the Atacama?

A giant hand, the Mano del Desierto, is the work of sculptor Mario Irarrázabal. Visitors keep scrawling on it, and he does not mind: he has said they write their names to become part of the work.

DNA tests showed that Ata, a 15 cm skeleton from the Atacama touted as an alien, was what?

A premature human fetus, and one the researchers thought no more than 40 years old. Chile's monuments council then opened an inquiry into whether the body had been illegally dug up and smuggled out of the country.

The Loa, which crosses the Atacama through Calama, holds which record among Chile's rivers?

Greatest length: the Loa runs 440 km in a great U from the Andes to the Pacific. Its water does not stay useful that far, because the Salado tributary adds so much salt that the lower river is almost undrinkable.

The Atacama oasis town of Pica is famous for which small citrus fruit?

Limes from Pica, sold in Chile as limón de Pica, are botanically Key limes. In 2010 they became the first entry in Chile's register of geographical indications, so only fruit from the oasis can carry the name.

The Atacama played the surface of Mars in a 2004 BBC drama, and space agencies go there to test what?

Rovers: NASA calls the Atacama one of the most Mars-like places on Earth, so its prototypes practise driving, drilling and hunting for microbes there. The BBC shot the Mars scenes of its drama Space Odyssey in the same desert.

What do people on the Atacama coast hang across hilltops to collect drinking water out of thin air?

Mesh nets comb droplets out of the coastal fog and drip them into pipes. At Falda Verde they water a commercial aloe vera crop, and a 2025 study found that bigger arrays could supply the slums of a desert city.

In 2024, Chile's Atacama mined about two-thirds of the world's supply of which element, familiar as a wound antiseptic?

Iodine was first found in seaweed ash, yet most of it now comes from the driest desert on Earth, as a by-product of the Atacama's nitrate ore. Japan, the next-biggest producer, pumps its share from gas-field brines.

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

Potosí's silver came down from the Andes by llama and mule train, across the desert to the Pacific. The mountain of ore made the city so rich that Spanish speakers still say something very costly is worth a Potosí.

The colonial adobe church in San Pedro de Atacama, the desert's main tourist base, has a ceiling made of what?

Cactus wood: slices of cardón trunk rest on rafters of algarrobo, and the whole roof is lashed together with leather straps instead of nails, the building method of the high Andes.

Which relative of the chinchilla, shaped like a long-tailed rabbit, lives among rocks in the less arid Atacama?

The viscacha spends part of each day sunbathing on a rock, never far from a crevice to dive into. When a predator comes near, a sharp, birdlike whistle warns the rest of the colony.

Which lander, digging into Martian soil in 2008, found perchlorates, salts that also turn up in the Atacama?

Phoenix's find reopened an old case. Heated with perchlorate, desert soil from Chile gave off the same chlorine compounds the 1976 landers had written off as contamination, so they may have burned the organics they were sent to find.

In June 1991, a single night of rain on the Atacama coast killed 91 people by setting off what?

Mudflows poured down the dry ravines above the port in the early hours, after only 42 mm of rain, carrying rocks, rubble and cars through whole neighbourhoods. The city had never built works to hold back such torrents.