Thanks to the lack of light pollution and altitude, the Atacama has some of the clearest night skies on earth, making for excellent stargazing. Cool off from the desert heat with refreshing swims in ...

Chile's Atacama desert is best known for its salt lagoons in the north, but head to the Mar de Dunas in the southern part and you will be rewarded with perfect wind-sculptured wave patterns as far as ...

Imagine a landscape so barren it resembles Mars itself, where some weather stations have never recorded a single drop of rain in their entire operational history. This isn't science fiction – it's the ...

When Eduardo Unda-Sanzana arrived in Chile’s Atacama Desert to teach astronomy, the darkness was disorienting. The remote location of the small observatory at Catholic University of the North made it ...

A vast high plateau in the far northwest of Argentina, the Puna de Atacama is “how the planet looked before us, almost before ...

The Atacama Desert in northern Chile offers an extraordinary travel experience that captivates adventurers, astronomers and nature enthusiasts alike. With its extreme altitude, crystal-clear skies and ...

The driest, highest desert on Earth, Chile's Atacama Desert, also holds the world's richest nitrate and iodine deposits. As such, a "white gold" rush there fueled Europe's bombs in World War I and ...

The rugged terrain of Chile’s Atacama Desert is etched with giant images of llamas, cats, fish, birds, and humans. Together, the geoglyphs recall a time when the barren expanse of sand and rock was a ...

Perhaps the hardiest assemblage of lichens and other fungi and algae yet found has been hiding in plain sight in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert. This newly discovered “grit-crust,” as ecologists have ...

About a decade ago, scientists became aware of a mysterious field of glass fragments strewn across Chile’s Atacama Desert. The shards were aligned in an expansive corridor that stretched nearly 50 ...