From space, South Americas Atacama Desert looks like a craggy patch of lifeless brown stretching 49,000 square miles near Chiles northern tip. At 7,900 feet above sea level, the parched, windswept landscape broils under the sun. Its the worlds oldest and driest desert.

Average rainfall totals little more than 0.04 inches per year, and yet plant life adorns the area in what would be the ear-shaped continents tragus with indigo cones of Lupinus oreophilus flowers, lime-green blobs of Azorella atacamensis, and Solanum chilense wild tomatoes that, when ripe, look like little dark plums.

For 10 years, Rodrigo Gutirrez made routine trips 1,000 miles north from his laboratory at Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile in the capital city of Santiago to 22 separate sites in the desert, where he measured the temperature and water, and collected samples of plants, soils and the microbes that cling to both. The molecular biologist then partnered with scientists from across the hemisphere and disciplines botanists, microbiologists, ecologists to decode the plants genes and learn how they adapted to survive in an environment extreme enough to challenge his own physical stamina.

On Monday, Gutirrez and 26 of his colleagues published nearly 300 genetic discoveries in a peer-reviewed paper in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. What they found could contain the secrets to avoiding food shortages in an increasingly hot, drought-prone world, providing scientists the genetic tools to breed resilient new crops.

With the population we have, we need to produce food and crops despite increasing desertification, Gutirrez said. The only way well be able to do that is if we can engineer some kind of tolerance to drought in crops.

But the findings also come as a warning of what could be lost as the global economy curbs its appetite for fossil fuels with solar panels and batteries made of lithium and copper, vast quantities of which are mined in the mineral-rich Atacama Desert.