Snow Just Fell on Earth’s Driest Desert and Woke Up a Million Dormant Flowers

In August 2026, back-to-back winter storms left parts of the Atacama Desert in northern Chile covered in a rare blanket of snow. The Atacama, stretching across northern Chile and into southern Peru, is far and away the driest hot desert on the planet — some weather stations there have gone years without recording a drop of precipitation. Snowfall isn’t entirely unheard of; the region saw similar events in 2025 and in 2011. But one of the August 2026 storms was unusually widespread, with snow stretching all the way from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.

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NASA’s Earth Observatory documented the transformation from orbit. The OLI (Operational Land Imager) aboard the NASA-USGS Landsat 8 and Landsat 9 satellites captured before-and-after images of the Chajnantor Plateau, within the Altiplano-Puna volcanic complex, on August 6 and August 14 — showing the plateau’s transformation from bare, brown terrain into a landscape blanketed in white. The plateau is home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA Observatory), one of the most powerful radio telescopes on Earth. As snow and high winds moved in, ALMA suspended operations entirely, moving its antennas into a protective “survival mode” to shield the sensitive equipment.

A second storm in the second half of August blanketed an even wider area. An image captured on August 19 by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite shows snow extending westward from the Andes, across the desert’s hyper-arid core, and nearly to the Pacific coast south of the port city of Antofagasta. That coastal stretch is home to several other major astronomical observatories, some of which also suspended operations during the storm.

Most of the region’s winter precipitation comes from cutoff lows — low-pressure systems that separate from the jet stream and occasionally reach northern Chile. That’s what produced the comparable 2025 snowfall event, according to René Garreaud, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chile. The late-August 2026 storm also originated from a cutoff low, but this one spun off from an unusually large trough — an elongated area of low atmospheric pressure — that spanned an enormous stretch of the hemisphere, from the southern tip of South America up into the subtropics.

That atmospheric disruption, combined with ample coastal moisture, produced precipitation across an unusually wide swath of the region — offshore, along the coast, across the core of the Atacama, and over the Andes. Precipitation totals reached a magnitude “rarely seen in the otherwise extremely arid region,” Garreaud said.

In some areas, it fell as rain rather than snow. Taltal, on Chile’s northern coast, accumulated nearly 40 millimeters (1.6 inches) of rain in three days — roughly 10 times its annual average. “We see these kinds of events only a few times, if any, per decade,” Garreaud said.

The abundant precipitation triggered destructive mudflows and flash flooding across parts of northern Chile. Chile’s National Disaster Prevention and Response Service (SENAPRED) reported that thousands of people were affected and hundreds of homes suffered major damage. Roads and rail lines were also affected by mudslides in some areas.

In response, Chilean President José Antonio Kast declared a state of emergency due to catastrophe for the affected northern province of Tocopilla, in the Antofagasta region, freeing up military and material resources to support the response.

Garreaud noted that a strengthening El Niño is the broader backdrop for the unusually wet winter across north-central Chile. Beyond the August snowstorms, a separate major event in mid-July brought significant impacts to the country’s Norte Chico region. During El Niño, the subtropical Pacific high that normally keeps the region dry tends to weaken, while a blocking high forms in the South Pacific near the tip of the continent — together pushing the Southern Hemisphere’s storm track toward the equator and into territory it rarely reaches.

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The winter’s rare, repeated rains aren’t done making history. Chile’s National Forestry Corporation (CONAF) is projecting a historic desierto florido, or “flowering desert,” for 2026 — potentially one of the most extensive on record, driven by the cumulative effect of both the July and August storms. CONAF estimates the bloom could eventually cover an area of up to 15,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of the entire Santiago Metropolitan Region.

The phenomenon is somewhat separate geographically from the snow-covered ALMA plateau and Antofagasta flooding described above — it’s centered further south, in Chile’s Atacama Region proper, across communes including Copiapó, Huasco, Vallenar, Caldera, Chañaral, and Freirina. There, dormant seeds that can lie buried in the desert soil for years are triggered by rare, sufficiently deep winter rainfall, eventually producing a landscape covered in more than 200 flowering species — including the pink, carpet-forming añañucas, the star-shaped huillis, and the deep-hued suspiros, among others.

The earliest flowers began emerging in mid-August, and by late August the bloom was already visible enough to draw international news coverage, including footage from AFP. Still, this is the early stage of a much longer season — CONAF expects the bloom to broaden through September, with peak diversity and coverage arriving around mid-to-late October, potentially extending into November depending on how conditions unfold.