Like so much of the Atacama, it’s incredibly remote, and peaceful – the only sounds you’ll hear are bursts of laughter from those attempting to swim while bobbing up and down in the lagoon.

The Atacama Desert stretches across Chile in a staggering diversity of discrete landscapes. While it can be a challenging place to call home, it is a playground of adventure for intrepid visitors.

The Tara Salt Flat sits at 14,000 feet in the northern Chilean Andes, at the eastern edge of the Atacama Desert.

Flamingos feed in Laguna Chaxa, a salt-rich lagoon in Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s a location that flamingos have adapted to live in over millennia. But each year, is still a struggle ...

Then, sometimes for just a few hours, microscopic drops of water coalesce in the nanopores of the salt creating “tiny swimming pools,” Gómez-Silva says — lifelines for microbes that find ...

The Atacama is the world’s driest non-polar desert – a landscape so vast and arid that Nasa practices Mars expeditions there. So when a carpet of purple flowers began poking through the earth ...

Lithium extraction in Chile's Atacama Desert exacerbates water stress in an already dry region, but debate rages about the industry’s true impact as the government starts reviewing the ...

You could be forgiven for thinking there’s no water in the Atacama Desert. In fact, the driest desert on Earth has underground springs that feed the Chaxa, Cejar and Tebenquiche lagoons, as well ...

Visitors stand atop a large mound of salt byproduct from lithium production at a mine in the Atacama Desert last week. John Moore/Getty Images John Moore/Getty Images ...

This alien environment, which was previously unknown to science, is made up of a system of lagoons surrounded by vast salt plains. They sit in Argentina’s Puna de Atacama, a high plateau desert more ...