María de los Ángeles Orfila is a science journalist from Montevideo, Uruguay, known for her long-form writing featured in El País and El Observador. She also participated in the Sharon Dunwoody Mentoring Program 2023 offered by The Open Notebook and has bylines in Science, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine, among other outlets.
For the first time in a decade, plants in the Atacama Desert have started flowering in the middle of winter, covering a portion of the driest desert on the planet in white and violet hues.
The flowering has occurred in an area covering between 115 and 155 square miles , said César Pizarro, head of the Biodiversity Conservation section and Scientific Research at the National Forestry Corporation in Atacama. A full flowering desert, which occurs in spring due to winter rains, can extend over about 5,800 square miles , with more than 200 species in bloom.
Image 1 of 3In 2015, the rains fell in March, activating the vegetation in winter, just as is happening now. But it's unclear if the same thing will occur this time. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast indicates that current ENSO-neutral conditions — a period when neither El Niño or La Niña are happening — will likely persist for one more month before transitioning to La Niña . This means that the drought will return, and the Atacama Desert will not have enough humidity to reactivate the vegetation during the cycle.
The rare winter flowering of the Atacama Desert is not without problems. The main one, according to María Fernanda Pérez, associate professor of ecology at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile , is that pollinators do not arrive as quickly as the plants react to rain."If the seeds germinate and flower but the pollinators do not arrive, the seeds run out," she told Live Science.
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