Atacama desert

Atacama desert
The Atacama desert has the distinction of being the driest place on earth. As you can see from the picture to the right, it doesn't even look like the Earth, it looks more like another planet. The Atacama is a 600 mile long strip of land on the north western coast of Chile, the desert averages about 45 miles wide. The Atacama covers an area of 70,000 square miles and is composed of salts, sand and lava flows, the lava sand and salt mixture gives some very interesting color combinations.


The Atacama Desert of northern Chile is the world's second driest region (icy Antarctica is first). Although the Tropic of Capricorn passes through the region, the Atacama desert lies in the rain shadow of Chile's Coast Range, which squeezes out the moisture from the atmosphere.


The Atacama Desert of Chile is a sparsely populated virtually rainless plateau, running from the Pacific Ocean to the Andes Mountains. The average width is less than 100 miles but it extends 600 miles south from the Peruvian border. The mountains nearest the ocean are the Pacific coastal range, with an average elevation of 2500 feet. The Cordillera Domeyko, a range of foothills of the Andes Mountains, lies east. The Atacama is made up of salt basins (salars) sand and lava flows. The landscape is so desolate it is sometimes described as "moon like". In fact the Atacama has been chosen as a good site to test the prototype of a future lunar rover.


The desert is completely barren and while most areas only receive moisture from an occasional fog or a shower every few decades, the rain gauge at Calama has never recorded any measurable precipitation. The Atacama is a high (most elevations are over 8000 feet) and cold desert, average temperatures range from 0° to 25° Celsius (32° to 75° F).


Lack of rainfall
The Atacama desert is considered the driest place on Earth.  Parts of the desert get rain on occasion, other parts of the Atacama are so dry, they have not received any rain since the mid 1700's.  The reason this desert is so dry is because it is bordered on the East by the Andes mountains, the mountains block any clouds from the rain forest on the other side of the mountains from getting over to the desert.  It's kind of ironic that the driest place on Earth is bordered on the west by the largest body of water on Earth.  Along part of the coast is a low coastal mountain range, the average elevation of the Atacama desert plateau is around 2000 feet above sea level.

Other life

There is a real town named Calama in the Atacama desert, There are shops, hotels, and restaurants in the town of 143,000 people.  Calama is one of the driest towns in the world.  The average annual rainfall is .2 inches.  Calama is located on the northern end of the Atacama desert at 8,000 feet above sea level.