La Garúa

My friend Nels in Lima commented about the unusually clear weather. Having been on the coastal plateau of the western slope of the Andes in winter, all I can say is, make the most of that sunshine. You may not see it again for six months. Because: La Garúa.

La garúa is a thick sea mist caused by warm tropical winds interacting with the Pacific ocean chilled by the Humboldt current. A thermal inversion. La garúa is a persistent low-level cloud cover, or fog, that blocks out the sun on the western Andes for months on end. Officially, it's winter from May to December. No matter that you're close to the equator. No sun means it's cold and damp and gray.

At sea level, la garúa drizzle evaporates, so there's no rainfall. It's an odd sensation. You can feel some dampness on your face, but if you sit on the ground, it never reaches you. Sort of like San Francisco's June Gloom on steroids. La garúa is bone-chillingly SAD—as in Seasonal Affect Disorder. A soul-smothering purgatorial greyness seemingly without end, without benefit of the delightfully earthy odor of petrichor.

The greater Atacama Desert is the driest place in the world—3 million years' worth of extreme hyperaridity. A rainshadow desert caused by the extreme height of the Andes. There is almost no rainfall along that entire thin strip of coastline that stretches the length of South America from Chile to Perú. It hasn't rained in some places in over 400 years.

The Peruvian Coastal Desert and the Sechura/Nazca Desert are northern extensions of the Atacama—by right it should be called the Sechura-Atacama desert. Bolivia lost its coastline in a Chilean-British conflict over guano during the War of the Pacific, (1879–83). Normal precipitation (in the from of fog) in the Atacama is about 0.07 inches (1.7 mm) a year.

When it does rain in the desert, the ground is so dry and hard as pavement, even an inch of rain can cause colossal flash floods. Like in 2012 and 2015. A freak snowstorm in 2011 dumped 31" of snow. I'll leave you to imagine the catastrophe that caused. (see my post Atacama Floods). Less than an inch of rain in March of 2015 (first rain in 80 years), caused not only mudflows, but an aftermath of colossal bloom of magenta flowers, the WA Post identified as desert mallow (malvia), but I suspect that might be Calandrinia, or Chilean rockrose as well.

Even the driest desert will bloom. The Atacama after a freak rain—a once-in-a-lifetime malvia bloom —Washington Post

But I digress, lost in the dizzying tracts of flowers... on the lower slopes of the western Andes, where the cloud cover kisses the mountains, a heavy fog drizzle also creates some biomes, or lomas —seasonal oases of unusual flora. A desert cloud forest.

La garúa makes Lima a damp place to be in winter. So if you've got sunny skies, pack all that sightseeing in, pronto.

What the travel guidebooks don't tell you is that la garúa makes it difficult to handwash your clothes—unless you have access to a clothes dryer. We never found any laundromats in Lima. Try drying your clothes on the clothesline during la garúa. Not gonna happen for at least six months. I melted a hair dryer trying to dry my clothes. Nae knickers and I was one cross camper.

Most people don't have washing machines, let alone clothes dryers. Some natives wear their clothes until they can stand up on their own, and just buy more when the dirty clothes run off on their own. The region is dry and dusty to boot, and aquifer water is scarce. Everybody else uses the drycleaners.

Going to the drycleaners at rush hour qualifies as a contact sport. My feet never even touched the ground as that seething mass of humanity inexorably pushed us forward to the counter to pick up our clothes. Added a whole 'nother dimension to Take me to the cleaners. I must admit I felt sheepish taking my underwear to the cleaners. But I was a much happier camper with clean knickers.

Atacama Floods

Dear CBS,

The thunderstorm wasn't the worst storm to hit Chile in seven years, it was the ONLY real rainfall to hit northern Chile in over a hundred year. You do know it's the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth?

The last recorded rainfall was about 80 years ago. According to the Chilean deputy interior minister, Mahmud Aleuy, it's also “the worst rain disaster to fall on the north in 80 years.”

But any rain in the Atacama region is a disaster waiting to happen. When the rain falls, it has nowhere to go. No vegetation, no soil. Nothing to absorb rain. So, it's all runoff. Rain never ever falls on the Atacama. Not even on the plain.

OK, so there was a freak snowstorm in 2011. Now that was an anomaly. It was meant for the southern Andes but the high pressure marine layer was disrupted. And it snowed and snowed. No flash floods were recorded but no one knew how to drive in snow.

CBS reported that thunderstorms dumped the equivalent of 7 years' worth of rain in 12 hours. That's technically true. But how you presented the facts was a bit skewed. How much rain? Seven years' worth of rain is 24 millimeters which is 0.94488189 inches. OK, so that's almost an inch of rain (divided by seven years), not a lot of rain, but it had nowhere to go, and the desert certainly wasn't going to soak up that weird, alien stuff. Think of thick dust on on pavement. Now add water. what happens next? Flash floods.

Normal precipitation (in the from of fog) in the Atacama is about 0.07 inches (1.7 mm) a year. And the southern region's been experiencing a huge drought. But if normal is 0.07", then I guess it's been about 0.1" moisture a year in the Atacama for quite some while. 

The Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, has been deluged by torrential rains and floods have caused at least two deaths, swept away homes and left the region without power or infrastructure. So, yes, horrific flash floods were in order. And sadly lives and homes were lost. Seven rivers, including the Copiapo River all leapt their ancient banks, such as they were. The rivers don't get much of a workout as most of the Andes rain and snowmelt runs east to the Amazon.

What's weird about this weather is that virtually no rain ever falls this time of year. If it ever falls at all. That's the real story. The sudden autumn downpour on the heels of an unusually hot, dry summer in the throes of an eight-year drought, has left parched fields. A disaster waiting to happen.

Northern Chile is normally cloudy (la garúa), but it never rains, as the marine front blocks all showers and thunderstorms. No moisture makes it over the Andes from the east, the mountains are too tall. According to a Chilean expert, Sagliani. "It is estimated that it has not rained in some places in the Atacama Desert in hundreds, even thousands of years." The surface is so like Mars that the Mars expedition test drove its robocars in the Atacama.

I was in Lima one winter, and there was no rain there either, but la garúa, the thick fog cap, blocked the sun for weeks on end. The only precipitation along the entire South American coast from Perú to Chile, is the condensation from la garúa. Not exactly rain falling in a rainshadow.

It's so weird to walk on bone dry dirt, there is no soil. It crunches under your feet like dried clay tailings or saltine crackers. I met people in Nazca who had never seen rain in living memory. But they told stories of deluges in Biblical proportions. And there are numerous ancient flash flood scars on the desert floor to support their stories. 

Sometimes rain happens in the Atacama Desert. It may not be related to global warming.

But the drought in southern Chile is certainly related to global warming. And this storm, destined for the Maipo vineyards of southern Chile, snuck past the desert goal keepers to weep in the driest of deserts and the world's largest open copper pits. Meanwhile, Villarica, a volcano in the south, which erupted on March 3rd, is rumbling again.

Chilean Miners

When Copiapó Valley miner, Florencio Ávalos broke surface from the penance of his underground dungeon, the collapsed San José copper-gold mine, ten minutes after midnight, Chilean time, everyone cheered and applauded. I couldn't help myself. From another hemisphere, another time zone, I too clapped and cried for The 33.

Los treinta y tres—a fortuitous number in Latin American history—the equivalent of freedom—the 33 liberators of Uruguay, Jesus's age, and his 33 miracles. But this is indeed a story of miracles. Though I suspect Roger Ebert would take umbrage over my fast and loose use of the word miracle or milagro. Mea culpea. And he's right. But I love the sound of miracle in Spanish. Let's just say it was a miracle of technology and tenacious know-how.

I don't have TV & it blows my mind that I can watch in real time this Chilean rescue mission. Amidst a covey of balloons against a backdrop of inkdark lapis Chilean sky, a tinabulation of church bells and the braying of  zuzuzuelas, or Genesis alarms, on CNN, they're saying their minds are blown… All our minds are blown. And it's a full-blown media circus—imagine 2-3000 media hounds at full bay. Though the media is literally being held at bay some 300 feet from the emerging miners, I can hear fragments of nasal American English twang rising over the din. Izzat Larry King?

The first miner to be rescued, "Florencio Ávalos came back to us on the 13th day of the 10th month of the 10th year of the decade —which adds up to 33," President
Sebastián Piñera said. It's also the numerical equivalent of AMEN: 1+13+5+14=33.