Outside of a handful of valleys in Antarctica, the Atacama is the driest place on Earth. The inhospitable landscape of sand, bare rock, and salt flats is so extreme and otherworldly that it’s used as a proxy for Mars by researchers.

Scientists have proposed an unlikely solution to water scarcity in one of the driest places on the planet: fog. By harvesting moisture from the air, they argue, we could provide vulnerable communities in Chile’s Atacama desert with much-needed water.

In a nutshell Scientists discovered that fog collection could provide up to 10 liters of water per square meter daily in areas surrounding Alto Hospicio, Chile, enough to help supply the city’s 10,000 informal settlement residents who currently rely on water truck deliveries.