where are the atacama desert located on a map
Atacama Desert The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a plateau in South America, covering a 1000-km (600-mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. It is the driest nonpolar desert in the world.[1][2][3][4] According to estimates, the Atacama Desert occupies 105,000 km2 (41,000 sq mi),[5] or 128,000 km2 (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included.[6] Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes (salares), sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.
Sahara The desert comprises much of North Africa, excluding the fertile region on the Mediterranean Sea coast, the Atlas Mountains of the Maghreb, and the Nile Valley in Egypt and Sudan. It stretches from the Red Sea in the east and the Mediterranean in the north to the Atlantic Ocean in the west, where the landscape gradually changes from desert to coastal plains. To the south, it is bounded by the Sahel, a belt of semi-arid tropical savanna around the Niger River valley and the Sudan Region of Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara can be divided into several regions including: the western Sahara, the central Ahaggar Mountains, the Tibesti Mountains, the Aïr Mountains, the Ténéré desert, and the Libyan Desert.