The Atacama Desert (Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau located on the Pacific coast of South America (Argentina and Chile). Stretching over a 1,600 km (990 mi) strip of land west of the Andes Mountains, it covers an area of , which increases to if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included.
The Atacama Desert is the driest nonpolar desert in the world, and the second driest overall, behind some specific spots within the McMurdo Dry Valleys. It is the only hot true desert to receive less precipitation than polar deserts, and the largest fog desert in the world. The area has been used as an experimentation site for Mars expedition simulations due to its similarities to the Martian environment.
The constant temperature inversion caused by the cool north-flowing Humboldt Ocean current and the strong Pacific anticyclone contribute to the extreme aridity of the desert. The most arid region of the Atacama Desert is situated between two mountain chains, the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range, which are high enough to prevent moisture advection from either the Pacific or the Atlantic Ocean, creating a two-sided rain shadow effect.
Andean orogeny and Arid Diagonal
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Atacama Desert ecoregion occupies a continuous strip for nearly 1,600 km (1,000 mi) along the narrow coast of the northern third of Chile, from near Arica (18°24′S) southward to near La Serena (29°55′S). The National Geographic Society considers the coastal area of southern Peru to be part of the Atacama Desert and includes the deserts south of the Ica Region in Peru. However, other sources consider that the part of the desert in Peru is a different ecosystem, and should properly be named as Pampas de la Joya desert.
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 the Cordillera Domeyko.
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San Pedro de Atacama is a Chilean town and commune in El Loa Province, Antofagasta Region. It is located east of Antofagasta, some 106 km (60 mi) southeast of Calama and the Chuquicamata copper mine, overlooking the Licancabur volcano. It features a significant archeological museum, the R. P. Gustavo Le Paige Archaeological Museum, with a large collection of relics and artifacts from the region. Native ruins nearby attract increasing numbers of tourists interested in learning about pre-Columbian cultures.
Caliche (kəˈliːtʃiː) is a sedimentary rock, a hardened natural cement of calcium carbonate that binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central and western Australia, in the Kalahari Desert, in the High Plains of the western United States, in the Sonoran Desert, Chihuahuan Desert and Mojave Desert of North America, and in eastern Saudi Arabia at Al-Hasa.
A desert is a barren area of landscape where little precipitation occurs and, consequently, living conditions are hostile for plant and animal life. The lack of vegetation exposes the unprotected surface of the ground to denudation. About one-third of the land surface of the Earth is arid or semi-arid. This includes much of the polar regions, where little precipitation occurs, and which are sometimes called polar deserts or "cold deserts".
We use 0.1 '' observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and JWST to study young massive clusters (YMCs) in their embedded "infant" phase across the central starburst ring in NGC 3351. Our new ALMA data revea ...
Hydrological extremes can affect nutrient export from catchments to streams, posing a threat to aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we investigated the effects of hydrological drought on nitrate concentrations in the streamflow of 182 German catchments from ...
Water Use Efficiency (WUE) is the variable linking assimilation and storage of carbon in plants with the release of water through transpiration. In this study, we combine multiple datasets including global scale leaf-level gas exchange measurements, tree-r ...