ADVENTURE TRAVEL: Extreme Arid Atacama

By Jorge Jefferds January 10, 2018

If you feel you cannot connect with the gloomy freezing snow storms in the Northeast of the United States or elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, maybe you would be interested in experiencing an extremely desolated warm place. Considered the most arid region of the world, experts have compared the Atacama Desert to the geography estimated in Mars.

Antofagasta with its famous natural rocky arch

It covers an area of 600 miles long from north to south along the Pacific Coast and west of the Andes Mountains. Imagine the driving distance between San Diego and San Francisco in California in order to picture the extension of the desert.

Even when there have been some strange climate phenomena in the last five to ten years, the lack of precipitation or rainfall is the main characteristic of this area. On average, it rains only 15 mm per year, although some locations barely receive 1 mm to 3 mm annually. The Atacama Desert may be considered one of the oldest as well, reporting extreme hyper aridity for at least 3 million years.

Stony figures, sand, salt lakes, and volcanic material cover up to 49 thousand square miles. There are some places like the abandoned town called Yungay, where you can perceive so much silence, loneliness, desolation, heat, and wind, besides all the features described above.

In a region about 60 miles south of Antofagasta, which averages 10,000 ft in elevation, the soil has been compared to that of Mars. Owing to its otherworldly appearance, the Atacama has been used as a location for filming Mars scenes, most notably in the television series Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets.

Parish in Maria Elena Office

In 2003, a team of researchers published a report in the journal Science in which they duplicated the tests used by the Viking 1 and Viking 2 Mars landers to discover life, being unable to detect any signs in Atacama Desert soil in the region of Yungay. The region may be unique on Earth in this regard, and is being used by NASA to test instruments for future Mars missions. The team duplicated the Viking tests in Mars-like Earth environments and found that they missed present signs of life in soil samples from Antarctic dry valleys, the Atacama Desert of Chile and Peru, and other locales. However, in 2014, a new hyperarid site was reported, Maria Elena South, which was much drier than Yungay, and thus, a better Mars-like environment.

The Atacama is sparsely populated, with most towns located along the Pacific coast. In interior areas, oases and some valleys have been populated for millennia and were the location of the most advanced Pre-Columbian societies found in Chile.

In later times, the Atacama oases experienced little population growth and urban development. During the 20th century they have had conflicts over water resources with the coastal cities and the mining industry.

Stunning landscape in the Atacama Desert

San Pedro de Atacama, at about 8,000 ft elevation, has been part of that permanent urbanization. Before the Inca Empire and prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the extremely arid interior was inhabited primarily by the Atacameño tribe. They are noted for building fortified towns called pucarás, one of which is located a few kilometers from San Pedro de Atacama. The town's church was built by the Spanish in 1577.

Likewise, coastal cities originated in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries during the time of the Spanish Empire, when they emerged as shipping ports for silver produced in Potosí and other mining centers. During the 19th century the desert came under control of Bolivia, Chile, and Peru. With the discovery of sodium nitrate deposits and as a result of unclear borders the area soon became a zone of conflict and resulted in the War of the Pacific. Chile annexed most of the desert, and cities along the coast developed into international ports, hosting many Chilean workers who migrated there.

The Chuquicamata Copper Mine

With the guano and saltpeter booms of the 19th century the population grew immensely, mostly as a result of immigration from central Chile. In the 20th century the nitrate industry declined and at the same time the largely male population of the desert became increasingly problematic for the Chilean state. Miners and mining companies came into conflict, and protests spread throughout the region.

The desert is littered with approximately 170 abandoned nitrate (or "saltpeter") mining towns, almost all of which were shut down decades after the invention of synthetic nitrate in Germany at the turn of the 20th century (see Haber process). Chacabuco, Humberstone, Santa Laura, Pedro de Valdivia, Puelma, Maria Elena, and Oficina Anita are considered the most tourist sites among the abandoned towns.

The Atacama Desert is rich in metallic mineral resources such as copper, gold, silver and iron as well as non metallic minerals including important deposits of boron, lithium, sodium nitrate and potassium salts. The Salar de Atacama is a place where bischofite is extracted. These resources are exploited by various multinational mining companies.

Because of its high altitude, nearly non-existent cloud cover, dry air, and lack of light pollution and radio interference from widely populated cities and towns, this desert is one of the best places in the world to conduct astronomical observations. The European Southern Observatory operates two major observatories in the Atacama:

    The La Silla Observatory

    The Paranal Observatory, which includes the Very Large Telescope

A new radio astronomy telescope, called the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, built by Europe, Japan, the United States, Canada and Chile in the Llano de Chajnantor Observatory officially opened on 3 October 2011. A number of radio astronomy projects, such as the CBI, the ASTE and the ACT, among others, have been operating in the Chajnantor area since 1999.

Sighting of Three Planets in the La Silla Observatory

By land, you can usually cross the Atacama Desert in a couple of days, making some stops in cities like La Serena, Antofagasta, Iquique, and Arica. It is recommended to stay in these places for two to three days, enjoy their beaches, seafood, handicraft, and make revisions to the vehicle in order to verify that it is still in good condition for the return trip if you feel like exploring the desert on a round-trip basis. Otherwise, you might prefer taking a domestic flight back to Santiago, the capital. Local Airlines like Latam fly all over Chile, returning you to the Santiago International Airport, from where you can connect to the world with American Airlines, and Delta if your origin stands in the United States. Remember that a snowstorm is not the only extremity a human being can bear with.