How dry does it get?
Q: What is the driest desert on Earth?
Tracy, North
Bullitt County, Kentucky, USA
A: That's debatable. The Atacama of northern Chile is the driest, declares
the United States Geological Survey. The Encyclopaedia Britannica casts its vote,
instead, for a low spot in the Lut Desert of eastern Iran where the summer heat
and low humidity are "unsurpassed."
 Valle de la luna near San Pedro de Atacama in Chile. Photo courtesy of
Zootalures and Wikipedia.
Either place is almost unbelievably dry. The precipitation (moisture
equivalent to rain) in Atacama averages less than a half inch (1 centimeter) per
year from fog. Measurable rainfall (more than a millimeter of rain) occurs every
five to 20 years and heavy rains fall only two to four times a century. No
vegetation grows here.
Mountains to the west and east sandwich the length of the 700-mile cool
desert. Summer temperatures average 65 degrees Fahrenheit. Weatherworn
mountains, grey with dust and layered by winds sweeping the desert, crouch along the
coast. The desert begins here, and stretches towards the Andes like an enormous
salt pan, devoid of life-not even an insect. You could almost be on Mars.
A cold sea current, the Humboldt, creates the desert. The great mass of
frigid water, surges out of the Antarctica Ocean and flows north along the South
American continental shelf. The shallowing land forces the cold, deep waters up
to the sea surface where the waters encounter warm winds that blow landward.
The warm air chills as it scrapes across the cold current and the air becomes
too cold to hold much moisture. No rain clouds, therefore, can reach the coast
and the land dries into an area as hostile to life as any place on our planet.
In the winter, fog rises from the upwelling cold currents, blankets the desert,
and gives moisture to the land.
 Our
other candidate for the driest desert on Earth, the Lut, is not a coastal desert
but rather lies in the northern of two deserts belts which circle our globe. The
Sun heats these belts of land more than any other part of Earth and creates
deserts.
A dune field in the Lut Desert. The crested complex star dunes have arms
greatly elongated in two directions. Winds come from different directions
to form star dunes. Photo courtesy of J.T. Daniels,
Goddard NASA.
The Lut is so forbidding that not even bacteria can live. Research groups
bring sterilized milk into the Lut and then store it uncovered in temperatures
that can exceed 160 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade. The milk remains sterile.
The Lut Desert consists of several large basins separated by worn mountains
and ridges, covering an area of about 200 by 100 miles. The west desert contains
wind-swept corridors separating high ridges. The east is a sea of sand. Winds
pile the sand into dunes up to 500 feet high, as tall as Washington's monument.
Alfons Gabriel, one of the first explorers in 1938 describes the sea of sand
as a "confused mass of impassable tangled dunes."
By the way, the driest desert in the USA is Death Valley, lying in the states
of California and Nevada.
(Answered May 9, 2001; updated Oct. 12, 2007)
Further Surfing:
USGS: Deserts-Geology and Resources
Carnegie Mellon U, Atacama Desert trek of Mars rover
The sand sea of the Lut Desert, Geomorphology from space, NASA
Death Valley Geology Field Trip, USGS
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