ENVIRONMENT
What other deserts experience periodic “superblooms”?
Teachers, scroll down for a quick list of key resources in our Teachers Toolkit.

Photograph by El Guille, courtesy Wikimedia. CC-BY-2.0
Discussion Ideas
- The BBC article calls the Atacama Desert the “world’s driest place.” How dry is it?
- Very! The Atacama is actually the world’s driest non-polar desert. Regions of both the Atacama and Antarctica have never experienced rain in their recorded histories.
- Why is the Atacama blooming now?
- Northern Chile experienced unusually intense rainfall earlier this year.
According to the BBC, the “desierto florido (flowering desert) phenomenon usually occurs every five to seven years when rains cause buried seeds to germinate and flower.”
- Northern Chile experienced unusually intense rainfall earlier this year.
- What plant life normally survives the arid Atacama?
- Well, the dormant seeds that flower during a desierto florido event are still alive during the Atacama’s arid periods. They’re just not blooming!
- Besides the dormant flower seeds, hundreds of plants have adapted to life in the high desert. These include dozens of endemic species of drought-tolerant plants such as cacti, saltgrass, and succulents.
- Perhaps the most famous of the Atacama’s plant community is the yareta—what appears as a blob of bright green slime is actually the world’s highest-elevation woody plant. To conserve resources such as heat, moisture, and energy, the yareta is very dense and grows very slowly—a little more than one centimeter a year.

Photograph by erdbeernaut, courtesy Wikimedia. CC-BY-SA-2.0
TEACHERS TOOLKIT
BBC: Chile’s Atacama desert: World’s driest place in bloom after surprise rain
Nat Geo: Death Valley is Full of Life
Nat Geo: Earth’s Extremes
WWF: Ecoregions—Western South America: Northwestern Chile