Where is the driest place on earth

Verily, the Earth is a planet of contrasts. More than 70% of its surface is covered with water. Because of this, in a number of cases it can be safely called "planet-ocean". And it is unique. Outside the solar system, thousands of planets have already been discovered, but none of them has as much water as our blue planet.

For all that, there are areas from which you can form a whole list called "the driest places on earth". Rain in these areas can be expected for a very long time, but never wait. Almost all of them are in deserts. They are united by an extremely low average annual rainfall rate. Even more surprising: there, in the neighborhood of the sands, people live!

Sahara Desert

Two Egyptian contenders for the title "the driest place on earth" - Luxor and Aswan - cities located on the Nile. The architectural complexes of the ancient Egyptian civilization in Luxor astonish imagination, and near to Aswan with its famous dam in ancient times mined a stone for the pyramids in Giza. It is not uncommon there are strong (150-160 km / h) and hot winds, bringing with them sand, and if it rains, its drops will evaporate, not reaching the ground!

Algerian Aoulef and Libyan El-Kufra, despite the almost total absence of precipitation, grow green due to oases and persistent human labor. In El-Kufra, adjacent to the 300-meter layer of Sahara sands, springs from the ground. Here you can enjoy local peaches, dates and apricots. The complete opposite is Wadi Khalfa in Sudan, located near the Egyptian border. This city is completely devoid of green spaces. Yes, they are unthinkable in very dry and hot air.

Namib Desert

Pelican Point - the driest place on earth? Hardly. But in Namibia, most of the territory is occupied by deserts and semi-deserts. But this is not just a town, but a pier on the Atlantic coast . It seems that there is enough water here - more than enough, and there is not much more precipitation than in Wadi Khalf. But beautiful large Atlantic waves made these places a real paradise for surfers.

Atacama Desert

Welcome to Latin America! In Chile, the city of Iquique is located, which in the competition for the title "the driest place on earth" is located in the ranking just between Wadi Khalfa and Pelican Point. And this is a full-fledged Pacific port! On the beaches of Iquique, Chileans escape the drought. They live here not only for the sake of the port, but also for the sake of saltpeter mined in the surrounding desert.

Another Chilean port city - Arica - is five times drier than its fellow countryman. It would seem that the Pacific, sufficient humidity, a lot of clouds, but water drops reach the ground very rarely. Moreover, in the adjacent desert there are areas where the last time the rain fell several centuries ago!

Another city bordering Atakama is in Peru. This is Ika. The fact that the climate here was deadly dry was not always assured by archaeologists, when during excavation their gaze appeared a large petrified ... penguin! Prior to the discovery of the New World, local residents mummified the dead tribesmen. Today, patients with asthma come here: Iki's dry air, they say, makes their suffering very easy.

And yet none of the above-mentioned dwellings of people is called "the driest place on earth".

Antarctica

The only, perhaps, arid region on the planet, not associated with the desert, is called very simply: Dry valleys of McMurdo. In the column of average rainfall rate, this name is more than an eloquent figure - 0. The local places have set one more striking record: the speed of winds in the Dry valleys reaches 320 km / h. That's the reason for aridity: from here all possible moisture is blown out. And this process continues, according to scientists, at least 8 million years!

The dryest place in the world is devoid of fauna: no animal here can survive. Of all the gigantic diversity of the Earth's biosphere, only sick plants and bacteria were found here. Another eloquent testimony: in Dry Valleys, natural conditions are strikingly close to Martian. It is no coincidence that in the mid-1970s NASA tested the landing blocks of the Viking Martian probes, which later successfully worked on Mars, under the harsh conditions of the Dry Valleys.