"Unbelievable! The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, is experiencing snowfall," the official account of the ALMA Observatory posted on X (formerly Twitter) on 26/6, along with a video showing the snow-covered landscape.
The ALMA Observatory's headquarters is located at 2,900 meters above sea level in the Atacama Desert, Chile, about 28 km from the antennas and telescopes on the Chajnantor plateau at 5,000 meters. The observatory noted that snow is common on the Chajnantor plateau, but the headquarters hadn't seen snow in 10 years.
Climatologist Raul Cordero of the University of Santiago said there's no concrete evidence linking this snowfall to climate change, but climate models suggest that "events like rain in the Atacama Desert are likely to become more frequent."
The Atacama, with its exceptionally dark skies, has been a prime location for advanced telescopes for decades.
The ALMA telescope, a collaboration between the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO), and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), is considered the world's most powerful telescope.
The Atacama Desert, spanning approximately 106,190 square kilometers, is the driest non-polar desert on Earth. Its landscape consists mainly of sand, salt lakes, and rugged terrain. The lack of rainfall is due to the Chilean Coast Range and the Andes Mountains blocking moisture from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Despite the harsh climate, over 500 plant species thrive on the desert's edges. During the wetter seasons, butterflies, wasps, toads, lava lizards, and iguanas can be seen. About one million people live in the region, including 200 indigenous Atacamenos. The rest are mainly descendants of migrants who arrived in the late 19th century to mine sodium nitrate, a mineral known as "white gold" used in fertilizers and explosives.
Hong Hanh (According to AFP/World Atlas)
