In the North of Chile, the Atacama desert, one of the driest areas in the world. Nevertheless, thousands of people are living there for a year. In the oasis, and the narrow valleys of the few of the Andes down trough the rivers, they grew beans, and squash, Chili peppers, Quinoa and Amaranth – and since about 1000 A. D., more and more Corn. Now is not an ideal field, the Latter is the fruit for this area, there needs to but just to his cultivation, not only irrigation, but also nitrogen – and phosphorus-containing nutrients.
Ulf von rauchhaupt
Responsible for the Department of “science” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
F. A. Z.
Chilean scientists came in now in “Nature Plants”, published a study behind it, what is the oasis, the residents shifted back in the position, the popular cereals: It was Guano, in the year thousands of seasoned bird droppings, about of cormorants and pelicans. Because of the same cold ocean current that keeps the moisture and the Atacama dry out, resulting in the coastal waters of a huge abundance of fish, to the myriads of seabirds feed.
your legacies to convert the time into a mixture of calcium phosphate and ammonium salts, which grew in some places, up to eighty meters high, before it was in the 19th century. Century was the largest export this region of the world – art fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen in 1908, was able to produce in the first place. This invention has enabled the First world war, or at least exacerbated, on the other hand, you came just in time, because the Guano reserves were exhausted as early as 1875, and from Chile saltpeter, the other a source of nitrogen at the time, would have been at some point there’s nothing left.
