Once Upon A Time in Latin America (24) the driest places in the world, Copper kingdom

Well, let's pulled back to the travel of Latin America from the study of Anthropology. The most beautiful attractions in Chile are these parts: Easter Island oversea, the capital and surrounding in the central, glaciers in the south, and deserts in the north. The season I visited was winter that the glacier park was not good for visiting. Since I had visited Easter island and the capital, my next aim naturally was the dries places in the world----the Atacama Desert in the north.

The Atacama Desert was robbed by Chile from Peru by the Pacific Was in 1879-1883. The total area was about 181,300 square kilometers. Under the combined effects of the subtropical high-pressure zone's sinking air currents, offshore winds, and the Peruvian cold current, this area becomes the driest area in the world. The average annual precipitation here is less than 0.1 millimeters. There was no rain in 91 years from 1845 to 1936, setting the world's longest record of "no rainfall". Due to too little rainfall, the soil here is so barren and acidic that even bacteria can not survive. The desert is as desolate as Mars, and the climate is similar to Mars, too.

So the Atacama desert is also a famous Mars simulation base. NASA is testing the latest space exploration vehicle here.

But more than one million people live near the desert. Without water, they capture the thick fog rolling over the mountain peaks using dense nets. The dense fog condenses into water droplets on the surface of nets, and the water is drawn to use via pipes. By using this method and collecting little groundwater from the aquifer, they plant olives, tomatoes, and cucumbers. While people on the plateau rely on alpine snow water to grow crops and graze camels and alpaca.

Many people who are accustomed to rainy life come here to experience the "drought" feeling. The Atacama Desert, therefore, is a tourist destination in Chile that attracting lots of backpackers all over the world every year.

Me too. I flew from Easter Island with heavy rain to the Atacama, the driest place in the world. This kind of contrast dizzied me, too.

To get to the desert, the plane has to get to Calama first. This is a city born for copper mine. Twenty-one Km away from the city, there is the Chuki Kamata Copper Mine, the world's largest open-air copper mine. Chile is the country with the most abundant copper mines, also is a country with the largest number of super-large copper mines, that it has a reputation of "the kingdom of copper mines".

Early in the morning, a small plane flew to Calama. Most of the passengers were locals and looked like many of them were miners. The landforms below were getting drier and drier. However, due to the high altitude of the Andes, there were still many snow-covered hills, which was very similar to the desert-Tianshan landform in Xinjiang.