A cracked playa in Yungay Valley, one of the Atacama Desert's driest places They selected a site in a playa of the Yungay Valley, one of the driest places of the desert’s hyper-arid core.

Traveling to the Atacama Desert feels like stepping onto a different planet. There’s a reason for that — the soil here is similar to that on Mars. It’s the driest desert in the world and ...

The Atacama Desert—an arid, unpopulated swath of northern ... microbial colonization to cease in the lower part of the playa sediments,” the team wrote, but “in the underlying alluvial ...

Yungay Playa with typical dry cracks ... Persistent microbial communities in hyperarid subsurface habitats of the Atacama Desert: Insights from intracellular DNA analysis, PNAS Nexus (2024).

This transition zone coincided with a change from clay-rich soils known as playa deposits to ancient ... which could release water within Atacama soils. The Atacama desert is often used as an ...

The Atacama Desert in Northern Chile has been a bit of a secret destination for those who love stargazing and other-worldly hiking terrains. It is home to ALMA, the world’s largest radio ...

Growing pile of clothing in the Atacama Desert in Chile Screenshot: SkyFi (Fair Use) The world’s fast-fashion addiction is wrecking the planet. It’s also contributing to an enormous and ...

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile is one of the driest places on Earth, but swaths of its usually barren sand are currently carpeted with a colorful bloom of white and purple flowers.

a tiny town of adobe bricks and whitewashed plaster in Chile’s Atacama Desert, is a whirl of billowing linen shirts, sun cream and ponchos. Tour operators and vendors call out to visitors in ...

When Eduardo Unda-Sanzana arrived in Chile’s Atacama Desert to teach astronomy, the darkness was disorienting. The remote location of the small observatory at Catholic University of the North ...