Atacama Desert

Coordinates: 24°30′S 69°15′W / 24.500°S 69.250°W / -24.500; -69.250

The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a plateau in South America, covering a 1,000-kilometre (600 mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. It is the driest non-polar desert in the world. According to estimates the Atacama Desert proper occupies 105,000 square kilometres (41,000 sq mi), or 128,000 square kilometres (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included. Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes (salares), sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.

Setting

The World Wide Fund for Nature defines the Atacama Desert ecoregion as extending from a few kilometers south of the PeruChile border to about 30° south latitude. The National Geographic Society considers the coastal area of southern Peru to be part of the Atacama Desert and also includes the deserts south of the Ica Region in Peru.

Peru borders it on the north and the Chilean Matorral ecoregion borders it on the south. To the east lies the less arid Central Andean dry puna ecoregion. The drier portion of this ecoregion is located south of the Loa River between the parallel Sierra Vicuña Mackenna and Cordillera Domeyko. To the north of the Loa lies the Pampa del Tamarugal.

Podcasts:

PLAYLIST TIME:

Latest News for: Atacama desert

Edit

Hollywood Movies Filmed in Colombia

Colombia One 29 Mar 2025
Released on August 6, 2015, in Chile and on November 13 of the same year in the United States, The 33 is based on the harrowing true story of the 33 Chilean miners trapped in the San José mine in the Atacama Desert after a collapse on August 5, 2010.
Edit

Calvin Klein jeans for free! Branded clothes dumped in the desert snapped up on anti-fast fashion website

The Observer 28 Mar 2025
Every week, Bastián Barria ventures into the Atacama desert in northern Chile looking for items of discarded clothing in the sand ... Chile’s Atacama desert is being polluted by huge waste from the global fast-fashion industry.
Edit

Calvin Klein jeans for free! Branded clothes dumped in the desert snapped up on anti-fast ...

The Guardian 28 Mar 2025
Items taken from a mountain of discarded garments in the Atacama desert were sold for the price of shipping in a fightback against the ‘racist and colonialist’ dumping of unwanted clothing.
Edit

Chile’s lithium boom promises jobs and money — but threatens a critical water source

Grist 26 Mar 2025
In the main square of Peine, a village of low houses and dirt streets in Chile’s northern Atacama Desert, there is barely any movement ... As one biologist put it, the Atacama Desert is a “geological photograph.”.
Edit

The effects of coal dust on solar PV plants

PV Magazine 26 Mar 2025
The results obtained were compared with three other sites in the Atacama Desert ... Since completing the study the research has attracted “considerable interest” from PV plant operators, especially in the Atacama Desert.
Edit

Some Science Is Easy To Mock, But It Might Have Saved Your Life

IFL Science 24 Mar 2025
ADVERTISEMENT ... The work has greatly enhanced human knowledge of life in the most forbidding places on Earth, like Antarctica and the Atacama Desert ... Yet that work came out of investigations into the venom of the Gila monster, a desert lizard ... Evelyn D ... .
Edit

'This Is the Sharpest Image Yet of Our Universe As a Baby'

Slashdot 23 Mar 2025
The article notes that "back in the Chilean desert," the Atacama Cosmology Telescope's successor, the Simons Observatory, has already taken its first image, and "will begin its even more detailed examination of the CMB in the coming months.".
Edit

Incredible photos show lasers shooting into space

Knoxville Daily Sun 22 Mar 2025
The VLT, located in Chile’s Atacama Desert, uses the light emitted by the excited atoms to correct for the effect that our atmosphere has on starlight as it passes through ... in Chile’s Atacama Desert.
Edit

Oxygen detected in most distant galaxy: ‘astonished’ astronomers

The Daily Tribune - Bahrain 21 Mar 2025
For the latest research, two international teams led by Dutch and Italian astronomers probed the JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile’s Atacama desert ... .
Edit

Energy Facility Could Spoil Observatory’s View of the Night Sky

PetaPixel 20 Mar 2025
A proposed green hydrogen production facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert may significantly impact one of the world’s most important astronomical observatories, a new study has found. [Read More] ... .
Edit

Oxygen detected in most distant galaxy: 'Astonished' astronomers

Khaleejtimes 20 Mar 2025
For the latest research, two international teams led by Dutch and Italian astronomers probed the JADES-GS-z14-0 galaxy using the ALMA radio telescope in Chile's Atacama desert ... Only later were they supposed to get heavier stuff such as oxygen.  ... .
Edit

Oxygen detected in the most distant galaxy ever found

CNN 20 Mar 2025
... other observatories such as ALMA, or the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile’s Atacama Desert, are seeing the galaxy as it was when the universe was only about 300 million years old.
Edit

Scathing Report Claims Energy Megaproject Will Ruin ‘Best Place on Earth for Astronomy’

Gizmodo 19 Mar 2025
The project in the Atacama Desert could increase light pollution by up to 50%, making it much harder to observe the cosmos near the Paranal Observatory ....
Edit

European star-gazing agency says Chile green power plant will ruin its view

The Banner-Press 18 Mar 2025
Europe's ESO astrophysics agency said Monday that a giant green energy project billed for Chile's Atacama desert -- home to the world's darkest skies -- will spoil its view of the stars and threaten its science mission ....
Edit

Here’s why researchers want to start farming fog

BGR 16 Mar 2025
fog ... Researchers tested this concept in Alto Hospicio, Chile, a city on the edge of the Atacama Desert, the driest non-polar region on the planet ... As climate change worsens water scarcity, experts are searching for sustainable alternatives ... Dr ... .
×