Big friendly giant carved into the Chilean desert

Big friendly giant carved into the Chilean desert This desert art work, which resembles a big friendly giant, measures over one million square feet, was created by artists Danae Stratou, Alexandra Stratou and Stella Constantinides to celebrate ‘the desert as a state of mind, a landscape of the mind’.

The Atacama Desert (Spanish: Desierto de Atacama) is a desert plateau in South America covering a 1,000-km (600-mi) strip of land on the Pacific coast, west of the Andes mountains. The Atacama desert is one of the driest places in the world (the driest being some very specific spots within the McMurdo Dry Valleys, as well as the only true desert to receive less precipitation than the polar deserts. According to estimates, the Atacama Desert occupies 105,000 km2 (41,000 sq mi),  or 128,000 km2 (49,000 sq mi) if the barren lower slopes of the Andes are included.Most of the desert is composed of stony terrain, salt lakes (salares), sand, and felsic lava that flows towards the Andes.
The desert owes its extreme aridity to a constant temperature inversion due to the cool north-flowing Humboldt ocean current, and to the presence of the strong Pacific anticyclone. The most arid region of the Atacama desert is situated between two mountain chains (the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range) of sufficient height to prevent moisture advection from either the Pacific or the Atlantic Oceans, a two-sided rain shadow. NASA’s view.

Credit: Google Maps