A large part of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, the driest nonpolar desert on Earth, is covered in wildflowers, in what the country’s forestry authority expects to be the most intense and extensive bloom since 1997.
The phenomenon is known in Chile as the Desierto Florido, or flowering desert. It follows heavy rains brought to the region earlier this year by the El Niño weather pattern, which allowed millions of seeds and bulbs to sprout and bloom, many of them after remaining dormant for decades.
The Atacama lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes, stretching some 1,600 kilometres down the northern coast of Chile. Its usual landscape is rocky, brownish dune and plain.
"It is a unique phenomenon; there are more than 200 plant species," Jorge Carabantes, head of the Protected Areas Department at Chile’s National Forest Corporation, known as CONAF, told the Associated Press. "This is a flowering event that is obviously extraordinary and unusual, very different from other blooms that occur elsewhere on the globe."
The bloom is estimated to cover some 17,000 square kilometres this year, an area similar in size to the Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile’s largest and most populous.
The rain that caused it was itself a record. Between July and August, Chile recorded record rainfall in several regions, with some levels never seen since measurements began in the 1950s.
"Since rainfall records began, these are the most significant figures in terms of volume: 160, 180, 190 millimeters in some locations," said César Pizarro, a biologist and head of the Biodiversity Conservation Section at CONAF Atacama. "What has happened now has an origin, and it is called ‘super El Niño.’"
Pizarro said the heavy rainfall activated the desert’s biological material, known as germplasm: seeds, bulbs and tubers, and also the eggs of various invertebrates and reptiles. The result includes red and yellow ñañucas, purple rock purslane, white suspiros, orange terciopelos and the garra de león, one of the desert’s most iconic species.
"There are hills and mountain ranges where no greenery or flowers had been seen for more than 30 or 40 years," Pizarro added. "This desert germplasm can remain (dormant) for many years, even decades. The hills this year are the best example of that."
Tourism has followed. The Atacama region is expected to see nearly 300,000 overnight trips by the time the phenomenon ends in November, according to data provided to the Associated Press by Chile’s National Tourism Secretariat, making the bloom one of the region’s main attractions this season.
It should be stressed that none of this costs the Atacama its title. The desert holds the record on the strength of a long-run average, and an average of that length is not troubled by a single wet winter. One hundred and ninety millimetres is a record for the Atacama. In the global ranking it is a rounding error.
The flowers are therefore not evidence against the designation. They are inside it. Seventeen thousand square kilometres of purple rock purslane is what the driest nonpolar place on Earth looks like when it has been rained on, and the correct reading of the carpet is that it is dry.
Our analysts consider this the only honest way to hold the record. A desert that surrendered its title whenever it got wet would be a desert measured on Tuesdays. The mean is kept over decades precisely so that it cannot be overturned by one August, and hills that had not flowered for forty years are the strongest evidence available that the long-run figure is the real one.
The Department of Unnecessary Research has accordingly asked CONAF to confirm the arrangement in writing: that the Atacama is at its wettest since the 1950s, at its most flowered since 1997, and the driest nonpolar desert on Earth throughout. All three are true at once. By Christmas only the third will still be visible, and it will not have changed.