What blooms in the Atacama after a rare rain?

A desert of flowers. Seeds and bulbs lie dormant in the soil for years, and when an unusual rain arrives - typically in a strong El Niño year - large areas of the driest desert on Earth carpet in purple, white and yellow within a few weeks. The phenomenon is called desierto florido, and it has been recorded in 2011, 2015, 2017 and 2021.

Around 200 species take part, many of them endemic and several found nowhere else at all. The strategy is to wait: a seed that germinates in an ordinary year dies, so the plants that persist are the ones that stay dormant through a decade of nothing and complete their entire life cycle in a few weeks when the water comes.

The rest of the time it behaves like another planet, which is what it gets used for. NASA tests Mars instruments there, and soil samples from the hyperarid core have been sterile enough that standard methods detected no life at all - which is precisely why finding nothing on Mars would not settle anything. The blooms are also now a tourism problem: visitors drive across the flowering ground and crush the seed bank that produces the next one.