One of the forgotten battles of the first world war was fought for Chilean dirt. It wasn't just any dirt, though – it was caliche, a whitish substance rich in the crucial mineral sodium nitrate. Nitrates are the active ingredient of bombs and bullets, and they became the conflict mineral of the Great War. Without a ready supply of Chilean dirt, the allies would have very likely lost the war.
When we imagine the first world war, we tend to think of the endless nights in muddy trenches, or the vast battlegrounds on which machine guns and artillery barrages decimated a generation. We don't usually think of the men and machines that were chipping away at the Atacama Desert to feed a far-off war. As we approach the centenary of the first world war, however, we should remember not just the battlefields of Europe, but also the distant nitrate fields that enabled one of the most destructive conflicts in history.
Nitrates are a stable and usable form of the nitrogen found in our atmosphere, and they feed two of mankind's oldest activities: agriculture and war. If you mix nitrates, potash, and phosphoric acid into soil, crops grow with a new vitality. If you mix them with charcoal and sulfur, the result is explosive black powder. Nitrates dissolve easily, however, and almost never accumulate in nature. Back in the 1830s, desert nitrates still competed with nitrate-rich guano deposits, but as guano supplies dwindled, the South American desert became the world's last remaining viable source. A swelling stream of miners in search of “white gold” began to settle the desert.
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