The Most Hellish Place on Earth Contender #1: The Atacama Desert

It's the norm for people from places with difficult weather to brag about how awful it is to live in their home. (I still complain about Kansas, despite not having lived there in almost four years.) Over the next few posts, I'm going to be going over the actual serious contenders, though. At the end, I'll be having a vote to determine what people think the actual worst place is. Our first contender? The Atacama Desert in South America.

The Atacama Desert [Image source]

Nothing- and I mean nothing- lives in the heart of the Atacama desert. No plants, no animals, no lichens, no fungus. The Saharan ants that @mobbs talks about in his recent post might be incredibly well for the Sahara, but the Atacama would chew them up and spit them out. There aren't even any bacteria in much of the soil in the heart of the Atacama. We've actually used the tests we use to detect life on our Martian probes in the Atacama, and nothing. (Of course, we might be using the wrong tests.)

There's some life out in the borders and gentler areas of the Atacama, but even those gentle borderlands are harsh by the standards of nearly any other place on the planet. We've found two species of ants (Solenopsis gayi and Camponotus morosus) that have actually come to share nests and not only tolerate each other but work together to live in these harsh environments, each contributing their own strengths- and ants of different species never cooperate. The only historical cultures to live there were fishermen surviving almost entirely off the bounty of the sea.

The extent of the Atacama desert. [Image source]

Why's it so hellish? First off, it's dry. Extremely dry. In fact, it's the single driest area of the planet outside the polar regions. It's 50 times drier than Death Valley, getting an average of less than 2 mm of precipitation per year. There's no evidence of any significant rainfall between 1570 and 1971. Some weather stations in the Atacama have literally NEVER received rain. There's a number of mountains in the Atacama over 20,000 feet in height that utterly lack glaciers and snowcaps due to the aridity.

In fact, the only moisture that some of the wettest regions of the Atacama get are sea fogs. If you had to live somewhere in the Atacama, you'd want to pick these hilly, sea-fog watered regions, known as Lomas. They're still not particularly nice, but life can survive there. In fact, many of the lomas have species endemic just to them. It's a classic example of island biogeography in action, just like what I talked about in my recent post.

The lifeless salt lake Laguna Verde in front of a pair of volcanoes. [Image source]

The aridity, while by far the most severe issue confronting life in the Atacama, is far from the only threat facing life there. The temperatures have the normal extremes of heat and cold you expect from a desert, which is no laughing matter. The terrain is also harsh. There's little to no shade. Salt flats abound. You sometimes run across a pool of water in the middle of this desert, only to realize it's saltier than the Dead Sea. Much of the terrain you'll find yourself crossing are ancient felsic lava flows.

It's interesting, though- most harsh environments eventually develop life. So why hasn't the Atacama? The first thought that springs to mind is that it's a relatively young desert, and hasn't had time for life to evolve there. In fact, however, it's the oldest desert on the planet, at over three million years old. Parts of the desert may be as old as 200 million years old, dating back to the dawn of the Andes Mountains in the Jurassic. It seems that there's just a threshold of aridity beyond which life just can't really survive.

The lush Atacama seashore at Pan de Azucar National Park. [Image source]

What causes the aridity? The Atacama is trapped between the Andes mountain range and the Chilean coast range, fashioning one of the world's few double-sided rain shadows. In addition, the weather patterns created by the Humboldt current off the Pacific coast of South America tend to discourage rainfall west of the Andes.

Despite the brutal nature of the desert, people do go there. Scientists are more than foolish enough to do it, of course. (It's part of our charm.) Due to the incredibly low humidity, it makes a great spot to set up an astronomical observatory- and, in fact, there are three major ones and a number of minor ones. There's plenty of geologists wandering around, a few climatologists, and some very disappointed biologists. There are also a number of copper, iron, nitrate, and other resources that can be mined from the desert. And, like any desert, there are plenty of people who race all sorts of people across the desert.

A copper mine in the Atacama. [Image source]

---

Bibliography:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laguna_Verde_(lake_of_Chile)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_lake
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lomas
http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Solenopsis_gayi
http://www.antwiki.org/wiki/Camponotus_morosus
Ant assemblages at their dry limits: the northern Atacama Desert, Peru, and the Chott El Djerid, Tunisia, by Harold Heatwole