This is

is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagyata.

Yata Kama Desert in Chile is one of the driest spots on Earth.

Sometimes, can't even see any life at all.

As I was a kid, those drives were really boring because there was nothing to see.

Armando Asuustos was born and raised in the Adakama.

He's now an astrobiologist at the Spanish National Research Council's

Center for Astrobiology. And he says with closer inspection, life can be found there.

But you have to take a microscope in order to see microganisms in those dryest places in

the Atacama.

Then in 2015 and again in 2017, freaks storms from the Pacific flooded the Atacama,

10 times the usual amount of rain fell, turning some of the The didn't exactly burst into bloom. I started looking at the microscope, I couldn't see anything.

This is surprising.

I was expecting to see a assume of little things moving all around,

but I couldn't see anything.

In fact, after sampling three of the newly submerged areas his team found only a

quarter of the microscopic species they'd previously isolated in the desert

region perhaps he says because the water killed the rest through a process called osmotic shock.

The cell doesn't have the mechanisms to get all the water that is going into the cell to get

it out. So they just start inflicting like small balloon

until they burst out.

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