“Out of dust and ashes, out of the broken shattered pieces of what once was comes beauty… ”
–Michael Traveler, author/poet
Photo 2017: The desert of the Atacama, in Chile, is a place so dry that some regions never receive rain at all. Yet underneath the arid surface lie the dormant seeds of hundreds of species of perennial flowers, and when the rains do fall, the desert blooms in magnificent variety of colors, shapes, and scents.
A masterpiece of nature
The Atacama Desert in Chile is made up of salty soil, sand and petrified lava and is considered a completely barren soil due to the specificity of this terrain and because it is protected on both sides by the Andean and coastal mountains.
It partly spreads over Antofagasta which is so harsh that a period of 400 years has been recorded in which not a single drop of rain fell.
However, it is not completely true that the Atacama Desert, which is as much as fifty times drier than the California Valley of Death, is barren.
The best proof of that is when rare water finds its way through the dry cracked ground to the flower seeds that have been hiding from the scorching sun for years, sprouts break through.
shared from Mary Rooney post.