01-07-2025
Driest place on Earth blanked by rare snowfall in Chile. See winter wonderland
Nestled between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama Desert has earned the title of the driest place on Earth.
The desert only sees rain a few times per century, or in some reaches of the Atacama, rain has never been recorded.
It's possibly even more rare when the fleeting rain aligns with freezing temperatures, and the landscape is blanketed by snow.
But that's exactly what happened June 25 when temperatures reached 10 degrees Fahrenheit and heavy winds blew snow across the desert, according to officials at the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, a scientific observatory on the Chajnantor plateau.
The antennas entered 'modo supervivencia,' survival mode, as wind whipped snow across the sand and the brown landscape turned white, according to a June 25 post on X from the Observatorio ALMA.
It's the first time in 12 years snow has fallen at the observatory, officials told Chile news outlets.
Getting snow where the antennas are located is not entirely uncommon, but they sit more than 16,000 feet above sea level, the observatory clarified in X comments, CNN Chile reported.
Where the ALMA is located, or observatory building, it's a lot less common, officials said, because the facility is at 9,500 feet above sea level and faces the Salar de Atacama, a large salt flat.
The observatory shared images on X of the area after the storm blew through June 30.
'In winter, some storms are fueled by moisture from the Pacific, which can extend precipitation even to the Atacama Desert's coastal areas,' Raúl Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago, told LiveScience.
In this case, an unusual 'cold core' moved across northern Chile and was accompanied by heavy rainfall further north, closing schools and causing widespread power outages and landslides, LiveScience reported.
It may be too early to say whether this particular weather event was the result of larger climatic change, Cordero told AFP, but the Atacama is likely to see more precipitation as global temperatures rise.
The Atacama Desert is between 600 and 700 miles long, and has been the center of regional conflict for much of the 19th century as the countries of Chile, Bolivia and Peru fought over the desert's natural resources, according to Britannica.
The desert is in northern Chile, touching southern Peru, southwestern Bolivia and northwestern Argentina.
Google Translate was used to translate the news article from CNN Chile. Grok, X's AI bot, was used to translate the X posts from the Observatorio ALMA.
