Spring has finally arrived in the southern hemisphere, and in Chile even the desert is blooming. Known as the driest non-polar desert on Earth, the Atacama Desert was covered in a large patch of flowers after the El Nino weather phenomenon brought heavy rains to the region earlier this year. The unusually large amount of water allowed millions of seeds and bulbs to germinate and flower, many after lying dormant for decades, the AP reports. “It’s a unique phenomenon; there are more than 200 species of plants,” said Jorge Carabantes, head of the Protected Areas Department of the National Forestry Corporation. “This is a bloom event that is obviously extraordinary and unusual, very different from other blooms that occur elsewhere in the world.”
The Atacama lies between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains and stretches approximately 1,000 miles along the northern coast of Chile. Although blooming is common during the transition from winter to spring, this year the rocky, brownish dunes that make up the usual desert landscape were transformed into a vibrant, colorful carpet of wildflowers during a historic Desierto Florido, or flowering desert. “I always thought it would just be brown. It’s my image of a desert, just brown,” said Felix Banda, 51, who was born in Chile but has lived in Australia all his life. “I knew it had rained a lot, so I expected to see beautiful greenery, but it’s an incredible landscape,” he added of his first visit to the Atacama.
Between July and August, Chile recorded record rainfall in several regions, with levels not seen since measurements began in the 1950s. The heavy rainfall was caused by a super El Nino, a climatic phenomenon that causes a sharp rise in global temperatures and is becoming increasingly strong. “What happened now has an origin, and it’s called ‘super El Nino,'” said biologist César Pizarro, head of CONAF Atacama’s biodiversity conservation section. The storms caused flooding, devastation and damage in several regions of Chile. In the north, they also enabled the historic desert bloom, with coverage estimated at some 6,560 square miles this year.
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