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NEIacademy.org. We leave you tonight with a beautiful site in an unexpected place. William Brangham

tells us about it. These wildflowers, gently blowing in the breeze, are delicate and rare because they live in one of the driest places on earth, a place usually hostile to any kind of flowering plant.

This is the Atacama Desert, a sprawling stretch of land squeezed between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, mostly in Chile.

It normally gets just two millimeters of rain every year.

But this July and August, some parts of the desert, got 60 millimeters of rain.

But rain isn't the only condition needed for this landscape to be transformed,

says Victor Ardiles, the head of botany at Chile's Museum of Natural History.

We understand that there is a threshold that must exceed 15 millimeters of rainfall

for the seas to begin to activate.

But in addition to water or precipitation,

we need temperature, we need a certain number of hours of daylight,

and we also need humidity.

This year, those proverbial stars aligned

and the blooms are bursting.

Ariel Oriana studies plant biotechnology

at the Andres Bayo University. The Atacama is is the driest in the world and also one of the territories with the highest

solar radiation and ultraviolet radiation on the planet.

This means there are very adverse conditions for the growth of any living being, and the fact

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