Apocalyptic Planet - Chapter 9: Seas Boil, Atacama Desert, Chile

Unfortunately for this Chapter, the COVID 19 brought a screeching halt to our class.  OLLI closed down the final week of class due to the virus.  So, the recap goes forward without any class input.

This chapter focuses on the driest non-polar region in the world.  Childs is once again wandering the planet with his buddy JT.  This trip he is looking for a place on earth that has been cooked to a crisp for 150 million years.  He has found it in the Atacama Desert. It is one of the oldest deserts in the world and remarks that there are parts of the desert where no measurable rain has fallen for centuries.  He was looking for a place that is uninhabitable and searching to experience what that might look like.  

He cites Jim Hansen, a NASA climate guru, as saying that the southern US will become almost uninhabitable if we proceed on the same path.  Other researchers were looking at how much climate change the human body could take.  They calculate that “like most mammals, humans would experience potentially lethal levels of heat stress with an 11-12 degree Celsius rise in temperature…”

It turns out that the Atacama is in large part a salt flat, or salar.  He goes into some depth explaining where the salt comes from….I leave it to you to read through that detail.  But, leave it to Childs and JT to decide to explore this salar.  “Ten miles wide at its thinnest and 60 miles long on its axis, we were crossing the salar on a diagonal.”   

The point being, as Childs says, “In the Atacama, I saw the future.”  He noted that the air was probably 87 degrees Fahrenheit, but the sun was burning through him.  He understands why the Southern Hemisphere skin cancer rates are much higher than in the Northern Hemisphere.  

They do find evidence of life via a flock of Flamingos and a mud patch presumably filled with microbes.  He shares that drill cores in both the Atacama and Death Valley turned up viable microbes dating 40 thousand years old.  

He leaves the chapter with one of his few optimistic views of life on Earth, “The earth is a seed planting itself over and over.  We are not the gardeners.  We are no benevolent being leaving the house every morning with a watering can and a trowel to dig up weeds, wiping our brows midday to marvel at our handiwork.  Instead, we are within the seed itself.  We are of its cells and the hardness of its coat, our place not to marvel at the futility and smallness of ourselves but to keep life moving.  What we do now, from the inside, determines the vigor of that seed, how long it might live and plant itself again.”

Well said Mr. Childs, well said.