Updated: Day 2-3 Atacama desert

Fog Catchers in the Driest Place on Earth

Parts of Chile’s Atacama Desert haven’t seen a drop of rain since recordkeeping began. And yet, somehow, more than a million people squeeze life from this parched land. And have developed unique strategies for survival…

The Atacama desert is known as the driest place on earth. It is made up of salt basins (salares), sand and lava flows and 100 times more arid than California’s Death Valley. Stretching 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) from Peru’s southern border into northern Chile, the Atacama Desert rises from a thin coastal shelf to the region called “pampas”.

Some weather stations in the Atacama have never received rain. It is so arid that mountains that reach as high as 6,885 metres (22,590 feet) are completely free of glaciers. There are sterile, intimidating stretches where rain has never been recorded, at least as long as humans have measured it. The Valley of the Moon (valle de la luna) for example bears striking resemblance to our satellite companion.

It is something of a shock then to learn that more than a million people live in the Atacama desert today. You won’t see a blade of grass or cactus stump, not a lizard, not a gnat. But you will see the remains of most everything left behind. The desert may be a heartless killer, but it’s a sympathetic conservator. Without moisture, nothing rots. Everything turns into artefacts. Humans evidence in this region dates back some 11.000 years. 

People crowd into coastal cities, mining compounds, fishing villages, and oasis towns. And it has been inhabited for thousands of years. International teams of astronomers—perched in observatories on the Atacama’s coastal range—probe the cosmos through perfectly clear skies. Along much of the coast of northern Chile, rainfall is so scarce that remote communities long had to import water by truck—an expensive and inefficient process—in order to survive.

Finally, however, some coastal residents discovered how to make use of the one form of precipitation they get plenty of: fog. Although rain rarely falls on the Atacama’s coastline, a dense fog known as camanchaca is abundant. This gives rise to a huge variety of cacti and other plants on the coastline.

In the village of Chungungo, human residents now take advantage of the same camanchaca that their botanical neighbors have so successfully exploited. A decade ago the villagers began to gather water using an ingenious system of nets that catch the fog as it rolls over the mountains above their homes. Constructed from a very fine mesh, the nets hang vertically above a series of troughs. As the fog condenses on the nets’ surfaces, moisture drips into troughs; pipes then carry the water down to the village. Residents of Chungungo can now take pride in their gardens; they can shower daily. The fog-catchers supply the village with an average of 2,600 gallons (10,000 liters) of water every day.