[thechat] the driest place in the world, part II

javier velasco lists at mantruc.com
Tue Feb 4 13:25:01 CST 2003


hey all:

if you can remember, some time ago I started up a discussion about the
driest place in the world, inspired by a TV show.

this weekend I was watching NGS channel again and saw a program about
Antartica that said it was as dry as the Sahara (same amount of
rainfall)

to my dismay, right after that, the same show i'd seen started, with
this crazy meteorologist looking for the most extreme locations in the
world. he had been told that the driest city in the world was Arica
(which we call the city of eternal spring) there, the people told him
that there were even drier places (Arica was still a world record) .
then i could see the rest of the chapter i'd previously seen.

I also saw some other interesting scenes I had missed before, like when
he finds a mummy in the coast, in some dunes. that desert holds the
world's oldest mummies, the place is so dry they don't bloat at all, he
saw something in the sand that seemed like a coconut, but he soon found
a cuople of empty eyes staring at him, weird.

the north of my country is full of archeological treasures, but there's
not enough resources in the field to actually discover all that is
buried in the desert. it is said that the first inhabitants of america
lived there, centuries before they crossed through the Bering pass.

at the end of the chapter they wrote that some days after the sooting of
the chapter they were able to find the records for the 3 missing years
(the world record needed data over a period of 30 years) and that
Quillagua had been recorded as the driest place in the world with an
average rainfall of 0.5 mm yearly by the World Meteorological
Organization and the Guinness Records.

I remebered this and today went to both websites, I found it at guiness'
site, it was very easy  NATURAL WORLD << WEATHER EXTREMES << DRIEST
PLACE

For the period between 1964 and 2001, the average annual rainfall at the
meteorological station in Quillagua, in the Atacama Desert, Chile, was
just 0.5mm. This discovery was made during the making of the documentary
series Going to Extremes, by Keo Films in 2001

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/index.asp?id=47536

wohoo!




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