Qualla: Salar de Pedernales https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:07 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/hero-small.webp Qualla: Salar de Pedernales https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales Salar de Pedernales: Introduction https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales/ Photo credit Jason Quinn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Oil seeps through the salt in several places, bubbling up through gypsum and halite like a slow leak from a buried world. Salar de Pedernales, the largest salt flat in Chile's Atacama Region, is a place where the boundaries between geological eras feel thin. Walk its irregular surface and you cross terrain shaped by Paleozoic batholiths, Jurassic rocks bearing ammonite fossils, and Miocene ignimbrites laid down by volcanic eruptions sixteen million years ago. At 3,370 meters elevation east of the Cordillera Domeyko, covering between 243 and 335 square kilometers, the salar sits in a basin that was created when the rising Andes severed a river from its lower course, trapping water that had nowhere to go but up — into the dry air.

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Image: Jason Quinn | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/67qf-salar-de-pedernales-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Salar de Pedernales: When the Basin Was a Lake https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales/ Photo credit Jason Quinn, CC BY-SA 3.0. Roughly 30,000 years ago, during the late Pleistocene, the Central Andes received far more rain than they do today. The Central Andean Pluvial Event filled basins across the Altiplano, creating lakes like Lake Minchin in Bolivia. At Salar de Pedernales, water levels rose an estim...

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Image: Jason Quinn | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/67qf-salar-de-pedernales-when-the-basin-was-a-lake.mp3 0:06 2 full Salar de Pedernales: Salt Sculptures and Martian Streaks https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales/ Photo credit Jason Quinn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The surface of Salar de Pedernales is not a featureless white plain. Salt has built tubes, polygons, pinnacles, and conical mounds across the flat, forming a sculpted terrain that shifts with the seasons. The central zone is dominated by halite; the margins grade into sulfate dep...

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Image: Jason Quinn | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/67qf-salar-de-pedernales-salt-sculptures-and-martian-streaks.mp3 0:06 3 full Salar de Pedernales: Eleven Millennia of Footprints https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales/ Photo credit Jason Quinn, CC BY-SA 3.0. People have been drawn to this basin for over eleven thousand years. The earliest human activity at Salar de Pedernales has been dated to between 11,612 and 11,201 years ago, associated with the Huentelauquen cultural complex from the Pacific coast. These early inhabitants hunted...

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Image: Jason Quinn | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/67qf-salar-de-pedernales-eleven-millennia-of-footprints.mp3 0:06 4 full Salar de Pedernales: Copper, Lithium, and Vanishing Water https://qualla.com/salar-de-pedernales/ Photo credit Jason Quinn, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1927, engineers dammed the Rio Ola and diverted most of its flow to copper processing plants at Potrerillos and El Salvador. The salt flat lost its primary water source. Vegetation along the Ola River and the Quebrada Pedernales declined, and the wetland ecosystem that had sus...

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Image: Jason Quinn | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/6/7/q/f/salar-de-pedernales-wp/67qf-salar-de-pedernales-copper-lithium-and-vanishing-water.mp3 0:06 5 full