Rare flowers bloom in Atacama Desert after a decade of drought

This is the first time in a decade that rare winter flowers have appeared in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, reports the Live Science portal. Part of the desert has been covered with a sea of white and purple plants.

“This very arid soil houses a treasure,” said ecologist María Fernanda Pérez in an interview with Live Science. Rainfall that fell in the northern part of Chile and covered part of the Atacama Desert, combined with morning fog, activated vegetation that can remain dormant for up to 15 years.

This year, the desert landscape was coloured by two flowers: bright purple Cistanthe grandiflora and white Nolana baccata. The vegetation appeared over an area covering 300-400 square kilometres. César Pizarro, involved in biodiversity conservation in the Atacama Desert, points out that an extraordinary spectacle can be expected from September to October. During that time, due to cold rains, the plants bloom over an area of up to 15,000 square kilometres. There are over 200 different species at that time.

Live Science recalls that rains similar to those recently falling on the desert occurred in March 2015. Two species of plants also began to bloom then. However, drought may return to the Atacama soon, so the vegetation will not have enough moisture to activate again.

Much depends on the coming weeks. If more rainfall occurs, the humidity will rise higher than usual. This may lead to another Cistanthe grandiflora and Nolana baccata bloom in the coming September. However, scientists’ forecasts suggest that this will not happen. Therefore, it cannot be ruled out that the blooming plants might be the last ones to be seen in the decade.

However, scientists from the University of Chile draw attention to the problem of rare blooming in the Atacama Desert. María Fernanda Pérez notes that the insects pollinating the plants do not appear as quickly as the plants respond to the rain. “If the seeds germinate and bloom but the pollinators do not appear, the seeds get exhausted,” explained Pérez.

Although the blooming plants in the Atacama Desert have a self-pollination mechanism, this is activated when no pollinators appear in a given year. It, therefore, activates late in the blooming period. Scientists do not know what will happen if the separation of insects (pollinators) due to anomalies persists for a long time. With climate change, such anomalies may become more frequent, so the plants will not reproduce. This, in turn, would make the desert much less diverse, leaving room for more invasive species.