Chile is a land of extremes. It's shape is a tiny sliver of land sandwiched between soaring mountains to the East and raging seas to the West. This means that at many points, you can see across the entire country (at least across it's width) from the tallest mountains I have ever seen, down to a palm tree spotted beach. Many Chileans like to say that Chile is an "Island" because it is isolated from the rest of the continent. To the North is the driest desert in the world (the Atacama), the East has the Andes mountains, the South has the Arctic and the West is ocean. This makes for a very unique environment. On top of this, Chile is considered to have the most natural hazards of any country in the world. Chile has all of: Volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, droughts, storms, landlides, forest fires, and many other dangers.
Part of what makes Chile's envionrment so unique is that it is situated over a tectonic fault, in which the ocean bottom is being forced under the continent of South America. This is why the Andean mountians exist with 100's of millions of years of compression and scraping crumpling the earth itself and forcing these snowy peaks into the sky. This also makes Chile very volcanic and it's length is dotted with steaming volcanoes.
