Snow covers Atacama, the world's driest desert

(Patria) - Residents of the world's driest desert, Atacama in northern Chile, woke up on Thursday to a stunning sight - its famous lunar landscape covered in snow, AFP reported.

"INCREDIBLE! The Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the world, IS COVERED IN SNOW," the ALMA observatory, located at an altitude of 2,900 meters, wrote on the social network X, along with a video of vast expanses covered in a white layer of dust.

The observatory added that while snow is common on the nearby Chajnanator plateau, which is located at over 5,000 meters and where its giant telescope is located, there had been no snow at its main facility for ten years.
Raul Cordero, a climatologist at the University of Santiago, told AFP that it is too early to link the snow to climate change, but he said that climate modeling has shown that "this type of event, meaning precipitation in the Atacama Desert, is likely to become more frequent".

Atacama, home to the darkest skies in the world, has been a favorite location for the world's most advanced telescopes for decades.

The ALMA telescope, developed by the European Southern Observatory, the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, is widely recognized as the most powerful.