The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a plateau in South America, covering a 600-mile (1,000 km) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. It is, according toNASA, National Geographic and many other publications, the driest desert in the world.[1][2][3][4] The Atacama occupies 40,600 square miles (105,000 km2)[5] in northern Chile, composed mostly of saltbasins (salares), sand, and felsic lava flows towards the Andes.