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About the Atacama
About Peru's Desert
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Atacama Desert at a Glance/ Peru
The Humbolt Current buffets the coastline with trailing cool, dry air. This dry air interacts with moist easterly pressure waves and becomes the coasts over-riding factor in regulating climate creating the arid environment of the coast.
Cultural enclaves have had to deal with brief interruptions of coastal climate norms with intermittent warning of the sea by a phenomenon called the "El Nino," named after the Christ child because it usually arrives in late December. Normal marine ecosystems are often greatly modified, which includes dramatic changes affecting marine life.
From Sipan near Lambayequ in the north, to Trujillo, Paracas and Nazca in the south documented evidence repeats the great successes numerous cultures have developed along the dry but potentially bountiful Pacific Coast. Neither "El Nino" nor the desert could sway the development of Peru's great cultures; in fact most of flourishing prehispanic coca production was grown on the Pacific slopes in the cool, moist, Chala region covered by clouds. An ocean trench, deeper than Peru's highest mountain, Huascaran, 22,205 feet, runs in close proximity to the shorelines. These depths, conflicting winds and air currents, and strong tidal surges create some of the most complex coastal interactions along the entire Pacific side of South America.
One wave action, near Trujillo, that has for centuries posed dangers to local craft is the six foot high wall of waters called the "mile long tunnel" It curls south in an unbroken stroke for more than five thousand feet, then dissipates in a booming cloud of mist and sand, flopping on a beach strewn with discharged shells and remnants of the sea.
Although many of Peru's cultural attractions are located on or near the coast, offshore islands and surrounding waters contain some of the richest marine mammal and bird populations along South America's western coast.
One hundred and sixty miles south of Lima, in a raw landscape of constant wind, stark lighting and thundering waves, lies one of the most valuable and thrilling marine gardens in the world, the Paracas National Reserve.
Here, a cataclysmic shift of the Earth's surface eons ago, combined with the crossing of two great ocean currents, caused an aquatic greenhouse to blossom. In the Secondary Epoch, what was then the Pacific Coast Range of South America sank suddenly in the ocean, forming what we now call the Peruvian Trench. Today, scientist also call the isolated marine biosphere the "lungs" of the ocean. It is so oxygenated by the convergence of the Nino and Humboldt currents, that here breeds a superabundance of plankton and phytoplankton, the primal basis of the oceanic food chain.
Common sights in the Reserve are whales surging against the Pacific swell, a multitude of southern sea-lions fatly reclining, condors riding a thermal updraft into the heavens, and giant leatherback turtles gliding just below the surface of the sea; while in the green depths, a manta-ray's 30-foot wing span moves as a black cloud across the ocean floor, scooping masses of plankton to its wide mouth.