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The driest place on Earth is in flower. Vast stretches of Chile's Atacama Desert — a landscape so dry that some of its soils have been compared to Mars — have turned into a patchwork of pink, yellow, lilac and purple, in what scientists say is the largest and most colourful bloom in about 30 years, and possibly the biggest ever recorded. It is a spectacle that lasts only weeks, and it is already drawing thousands of visitors to one of the most remote corners of South America.
How a desert learns to flower
The bloom, known locally as the desierto florido — the flowering desert — follows a winter of extraordinary rain. Heavy rains linked to this year's El Niño super cycle soaked the Atacama, with some areas receiving their heaviest rainfall since records began in the 1950s. In July and August, flash floods swept through parts of the desert, destroying or damaging dozens of homes and forcing hundreds of people to evacuate. The same water then sank deeper into the parched ground than it has in decades — deep enough to wake millions of seeds, bulbs and tubers that had lain dormant under the sand, many of them for decades.
More than 200 plant species are now in flower, according to NPR, which reported from Copiapó on November 8. Chile's forestry agency, CONAF, had projected in September that the bloom could cover up to 15,000 square kilometres along the coast of the Atacama Region, from Chañaral in the north to Freirina in the south — the largest since 1997. One of the stars is the garra de león, or lion's claw, a crimson flower with flame-like leaves that grows along only a few miles of this coastline and nowhere else in the world. The first plants to emerge created a pale-yellow landscape; purple flowers followed as more bulbs germinated.
A race against the clock
The bloom is brief. Each plant has only about two to three months to complete its life cycle before the flowers dry out and release their seeds back into the soil, where they will wait — perhaps for years, perhaps for decades — for the next rain. NPR reports the display is expected to last until mid-November. That deadline has set off a quiet race: biologists from INIA, Chile's national seed bank, are collecting specimens to analyse in the laboratory before the flowering season ends, hoping to establish whether this was the biggest flowering on record — and whether closer study will turn up plant species nobody has described yet.
Scientists say there are patches of desert in bloom where flowers have never previously been recorded, suggesting bulbs have remained dormant there since before the phenomenon was first studied in detail in 1997. The Atacama's administrator of Llanos de Challe National Park — a park created in June 2023 specifically to protect the bloom — calls the desert a natural seed bank that comes to life after rain. The region's governor, Miguel Vargas, has begun the process of seeking UNESCO World Heritage recognition for the phenomenon. It is a strange, hopeful coda to a destructive winter: the floods that wrecked homes also woke a desert. In a few weeks the flowers will be gone, the seeds buried again, and the Atacama will go back to being the driest place on Earth — until the next rain, whenever that comes. For more science from this batch, see NASA Is Hiring Astronauts for the Moon and our earlier report on Japan's False 9.9 Earthquake Alert.