Researchers analyzing a fossilized capybara tooth discovered in Chile’s Atacama Desert have revealed that the region supported wetlands and palm forests nine million years ago. Meanwhile, a winter storm in August 2026 brought widespread snow and rain from the Andes to the Pacific coast, triggering a rare desert wildflower bloom.
The Atacama Desert is globally recognized as one of the driest environments on Earth, but recent scientific findings and unusual weather events are reshaping our understanding of the region’s past and present. While a winter storm system created a rare snowscape across northern Chile, paleontologists studying local sedimentary deposits have uncovered unexpected fossil evidence pointing to a dramatically wetter climate millions of years ago.
Fossil Evidence Challenges Long-Standing Climate Views in El Morro
Researchers have identified a fossilized capybara tooth dating back nearly nine million years within the Bahía Inglesa Formation at El Morro, marking the oldest recorded presence of capybaras in coastal Chile. Because modern capybaras are the world’s largest living rodents and rely heavily on freshwater environments and wetland vegetation, their presence in what is now an extreme desert challenges the long-held assumption that the Atacama has remained continuously dry for approximately 40 million years.
Finding a capybara tooth in a marine deposit in what today is one of the driest regions on Earth is just freakish,
said lead author Priscilla Martinez, a doctoral student at the University of Arizona.
The capybara specimen measures around two-thirds of an inch long (scale equals 10 mm or 0.4 inches). The shallow marine deposits where it was found, dating between 7-10 million years ago during the late Miocene epoch, also contain fossils of freshwater fish and gavials. Phytolith analysis from the site further reveals that the ancient landscape supported palms and other flowering plants, including dicotyledonous plants.
Think sunny Southern California full of palm trees,
Martinez explains. You don’t really expect the Atacama Desert to have palms, and we’re not sure if they were blooming extensively there, but they were definitely there.
Furthermore, researchers note that capybaras likely dispersed along low-elevation environments around the northern edge of South America rather than crossing the towering Andes mountain range, which already presented a substantial geographical and climatic barrier when the animal lived in the region.
Satellite Imagery Captures Widespread Winter Snow Across Northern Chile
Fast-forwarding to the present day, the Atacama recently underwent another dramatic transformation through an unusual sequence of winter weather. Meteorological events in August brought heavy moisture to northern Chile as the Southern Hemisphere wrapped up its winter months.
A winter storm brought about the dramatic change between the first photo taken on Aug. 6 and the second taken on Aug. 14. Another winter storm passed through on Aug. 19, blanketing an even wider area with fresh snowfall, captured in an image on August 19, 2026, by the MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) on NASA’s Terra satellite that spans a vast area of northern Chile, from the Andes to near the Pacific coast.
While snow is not entirely unprecedented in the region—with the Atacama having seen snow before, most notably in 2025 and 2011—meteorologists emphasize that the sheer geographic extent of the August storms makes the event unusually widespread.
Moisture Triggers Desert Blooms and Highlights Stargazing Conditions
The winter precipitation has already set off secondary ecological responses across the landscape. The influx of moisture from the rain and snow throughout the winter triggers a massive wildflower bloom across the desert, and observers are already seeing the flowers begin to emerge. By August 25, 2026, the driest desert on the planet was covered in a blanket of purple and white flowers in Copiapo, Chile, which bloomed due to the unusual rains recorded in that region of northern Chile.
Beyond its botanical and paleontological shifts, the Atacama remains a premier destination for sky-watching too. Due to its high altitude, extreme dryness, and absence of light pollution, locations like the Valle de la Luna offer the perfect location for stargazing.
Understanding past climate changes that occurred without human influence can also provide a baseline for assessing how these environments may change as a result of human-driven climate change, as deserts are extremely sensitive to changes in climate, including shifts in monsoon intensity from year to year.
