atacama desert
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Earth’s Most Barren Spot Found Bursting With Microbial Activity, Boosting Search for Life on Mars
The Atacama Desert—an arid, unpopulated swath of northern Chile that is home to some of the most perceptive ground telescopes on Earth—is actually teeming with life beneath the ground, according to a team of researchers that recently scrutinized its soils. As LiveScience reminds us, scientists have already found microbial life under the desert’s surface. What…
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See Carpets of Flowers and Dunes of Clothing in World’s Driest Desert
Chile’s Atacama Desert is a place of surreal contradictions: Delicate flowers, blooming only once or twice a decade, suddenly cover a bone-dry landscape. Huge dunes of discarded clothing appear alongside undulating sand.
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Ancient Comet May Have Turned Chilean Desert Into Glass
Nearly 80 kilometres of the Chilean coast are covered with oblong fragments of desert glass that researchers who recently studied them say came from a comet’s explosion over the Atacama Desert about 12,000 years ago.
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First Major Rain In Centuries Triggers Wave Of Death In Earth’s Driest Desert
After not experiencing any meaningful amounts of precipitation for at least 500 years, Chile’s Atacama Desert is finally getting some rain. Quite unexpectedly, however, these rains—instead of fostering life—are doing the exact opposite.