60 free Atacama Desert trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
The Atacama Desert is a 1,600-kilometre strip of northern Chile where some weather stations have never recorded rain, and this Atacama Desert trivia quiz covers everything that makes it strange. The geography questions take in the two-sided rain shadow, the cold current offshore, the camanchaca fog that keeps cacti and penguins alive, the salt flats, geysers and volcanoes of the high Andes, and the soil so lifeless that NASA tests Mars instruments in it. The human story runs from the Chinchorro fishermen who mummified their dead two thousand years before the Egyptians, through the Atacameno fortress towns and the Spanish church of San Pedro, to the nitrate boom, the War of the Pacific, the ghost towns of Humberstone and Santa Laura, and the copper mines of Chuquicamata and Escondida. There are questions on the 33 miners rescued in 2010, the Dakar Rally, the giant hand in the sand and the world's biggest telescopes at Paranal, ALMA and Cerro Armazones. Difficulty runs from easy to expert. Every answer was verified against Wikipedia's articles on the desert and its places, people and events, and each question links to its source. Try our Deserts, Gobi Desert and Chile quizzes next.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The 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?
Fog desert
Marine fog rolling in off the Pacific supplies the only moisture many of its plants ever get.
Q 02The desert runs along the Pacific coast of northern Chile in a strip roughly how long?
1,600 km
It covers about 105,000 square kilometres, rising to 128,000 if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are counted.
Q 03Which cold flow of Pacific water, moving north along the coast, reinforces the desert's extreme dryness?
The Humboldt Current
The current chills the air above it, so moisture forms fog rather than rain clouds.
Q 04The desert sits in a two-sided rain shadow between the Andes and which other chain of mountains?
The Chilean Coast Range
Together the ranges block moisture from both the Pacific and the Atlantic.
Q 05Roughly how much rain does the desert receive in an average year?
15 mm
Some individual weather stations have never recorded rain at all.
Q 06Evidence suggests parts of the desert received no significant rainfall from 1570 until which year?
1971
That is a dry spell of some 400 years.
Q 07What is the local name for the marine fog that supports lichens, algae and cacti in the desert?
Camanchaca
Copiapoa cacti are among the plants that survive on its moisture alone.
Q 08The desert may be the oldest on Earth, with hyper-arid conditions dating back at least to which geological epoch?
The Miocene
Some evaporite formations suggest arid conditions have persisted in places for 200 million years.
Q 09In 2003 researchers repeated the life-detection tests of which Mars probes on soil from the Yungay area and found no signs of life?
The Viking landers
NASA now uses the region to test instruments for future Mars missions.
Q 10The Chinchorro people of the coast made the world's oldest artificial mummies, predating Egypt's by up to how long?
About 2,000 years
The oldest deliberately preserved Chinchorro mummies date from around 5050 BC.
Q 11Chinchorro "black mummies" got their colour because the skin was painted with what?
Manganese
Later red mummies were painted with ochre while the heads stayed black.
Q 12The Atacama Giant, about 119 metres tall on Cerro Unita, is the largest prehispanic example of what?
A human-shaped geoglyph
It is one of nearly 5,000 geoglyphs found in the region in recent decades.
Q 13The Atacameño people who lived in the interior before the Incas built fortified towns known by what name?
Pucarás
One stands a few kilometres from San Pedro de Atacama.
Q 21In 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?
Quilapayún
General Roberto Silva Renard commanded the troops.
Q 22Chuquicamata, near Calama, is the world's largest open-pit copper mine by excavated volume; which US mine is the only one deeper?
Bingham Canyon, Utah
Chuqui's pit is about 850 metres deep.
Q 23The "Copper Man", a mummified miner found at Chuquicamata in 1899, dates from about which year?
AD 550
It shows copper was being dug at Chuqui more than a thousand years before the industrial mine opened.
Q 14The desert's roughly 170 abandoned mining towns were mostly shut down after the German invention of what?
Synthetic nitrate (Haber process)
Chacabuco, Humberstone, Santa Laura, Pedro de Valdivia and María Elena are among the ghost towns left behind.
Q 15Humberstone and Santa Laura, made a World Heritage Site in 2005, were what kind of industrial site?
Saltpeter works
They were on the danger list until restoration got them removed in 2019.
Q 16Which country lost its entire coastline to Chile in the War of the Pacific of 1879-1884?
Bolivia
It also lost the department of Litoral, and still presses its claim to the sea today.
Q 17The War of the Pacific is also known by what name, after a controversial export tax?
The Ten Cents War
It is also called the Saltpeter War and the Nitrate War.
Q 18On 14 February 1879 Chilean forces occupied which port without resistance, triggering the war?
Antofagasta
The town was mostly inhabited by Chilean miners; war was declared weeks later.
Q 19A 1929 compromise finally settled the war's northern border by giving Chile which of two disputed cities, while the other went to Peru?
Arica
Chile had seized it from Peru in 1880; Tacna went back to Peru.
Q 20The naval Battle of Iquique on 21 May 1879 is commemorated in Chile as which annual public holiday?
Navy Day
Captain Arturo Prat died leaping aboard the Peruvian ironclad Huáscar.
Q 24Which Atacama mine has been Chile's most productive copper mine every year since 1996?
Escondida
In some years it produces more than double the next largest mine.
Q 25How many days were the 33 miners of the San José mine trapped underground in 2010?
69
The cave-in came on 5 August and the last man surfaced on 13 October.
Q 26Seventeen days after the 2010 cave-in, how did the trapped miners first tell the surface they were alive?
A note taped to a drill bit
The note read "Estamos bien en el Refugio los 33".
Q 27Which shift foreman organised the trapped miners and their rations in 2010?
Luis Urzúa
Supplies meant for a couple of days were stretched to two weeks.
Q 28The Copiapó-Caldera railway, opened in 1850, was the first railway on which continent?
South America
Its first section opened on 4 July in honour of the American businessman William Wheelwright who built it.
Q 29Which motorsport event raced through the desert's dunes near Copiapó each year from 2009 to 2012?
The Dakar Rally
It was organised by the Amaury Sport Organisation after leaving Africa.
Q 30ALMA, on the 5,000-metre Chajnantor plateau, is an array of how many radio antennas?
66
It observes at millimetre and submillimetre wavelengths and has been fully operational since 2013.