The Atacama Desert in Chile, also dubbed the “driest place on Earth”, has turned into a lovely place full of pink flowers due to a record-breaking amount of rainfall in the past year, ABC News revealed.
Advertisement
Chile’s Atacama Desert is known as one of the driest places across the entire globe, and when it was slammed with nearly a year’s worth of water in a 12-hour period (0.9 inches, in comparison to the annual average of 0.13), flooding took almost 30 lives and left many more homeless and injured. “And the fact that it has happened twice in the same year has never been recorded in the country’s history”.
It’s said the transformation occurs once every 5-7 years, although this riot of colour has been labelled “unprecedented”. When El Niño came, heavy thunderstorms delivered 0.96 inches of rain in a single day to various parts of the Atacama Desert, which is equivalent to 14 years of rain. “In 2010, we had a long flowering but already this year, 2015, has surpassed all the previous ones”, Rodrigo Ruiz, acting regional director of Chile’s National Tourism Service, told the global Business Times. At least 28 people were killed in the torrential downpours that caused mudslides and rivers to breach their banks. During the 20th century, it experienced 173 straight months without rain, according to The Washington Post. But within weeks, the normally barren landscape of the Atacama desert was transformed into a carpet of flowers.
Advertisement
More than 200,000 tourists are expected to flock down to witness this stunning spectacle, but if you want to be one of them you better plan a trip soon. The flowers will most likely stay in their rich pink hue until November 2015.
