You'd think that a land right next to the ocean would be moist, and lush with green, growing things, but nature just doesn't work that way. Take the Atacama Desert in Chile as an example.

The Atacama lies on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, and runs literally from the shore, up into the mountains. Even though it's in the Southern Hemisphere, and it is a desert, it's not the hot, burning sands that one associates with other deserts like the Sahara. In fact, the Atacama is frequently quite a cold place to be, with temperatures ranging from 32-77F, because of its high elevation.

Deserts are defined in terms of the amount of waterfall received, which means it's pretty easy to determine that the Atacama is one of the driest places on Earth, with an average .0004 inches of rain per year, sometimes going several years with no rain at all. Even the periodic warming effects that can change weather the world over, dumping floods on normally arid locations, don't bless the Atacama Desert.

This is mostly due to the Andes Mountains and the primarily warm, moisture laden winds coming from the east, rising to pass over the mountains and encountering temperatures that cause the moisture to form into raindrops and fall. As the winds soar over the mountain peaks, and down the Atacama side of the mountain range, the arid air warms again and retains its moisture as it passes over the desert.

However, there is moisture in and around the Atacama Desert. On the mountaintops, there is a semi-permanent cap of snow, because the temperatures never get warm enough to melt it. And in lower regions, large lakes created by heavy rainfalls centuries ago, grow progressively smaller with evaporation, creating a high salt content on the shores and in the water.