Rub al-Khali Desert

Rubʿ al Khali Desert

Rub al-Khali is a sandy desert, one of the largest and hottest in the world, located in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula. During the day, the fiery red sand manages to heat up to seventy degrees. The Rub al-Khali desert stretches for about 1000 kilometers in length and 500 kilometers in width on the territories of four countries – Saudi Arabia, Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates. The desert rises to 800 meters in the southwest and roughly coincides with sea level in the northeast.

Video: Rub al-Khali

General Information

The name Rub al-Khali translates from Arabic as “empty quarter”. For a long time the desert was considered the most impassable and difficult terrain to live in. For several hundred years, caravans brought precious incense, spices and fabrics from South Asia through it.

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If you look at Rub al-Khali through an airplane window, it may look like someone has covered the vast area with sand and leveled everything. It is really a flat desert. Though here there are some elevations 200-300m high in the form of barchans and sand hills. So in the southwest the desert rises to 800 meters, and in the northeast approximately coincides with sea level.

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A striking feature of the local landscapes are sand dunes up to 250 meters high, alternating with gypsum plains and gravel. The sand has a characteristic reddish-orange color due to its feldspar content.

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But has the now deserted place on the Arabian Peninsula always been lifeless? Not at all.

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By studying the area from satellites, scientists have confirmed the existing hypothesis that the desert about five millennia ago thrived several cities, among them – Ubar, which is also called the City of a Thousand Pillars.

The Rub al-Khali Desert is not entirely lifeless even today.

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Despite the fact that the climate here is tropical with low rainfall (about 55 mm per year), water can sometimes be found at 10 meters depth.

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It is believed that there is a whole network of rivers buried under the sands. Once very long ago, these areas were the bottom of a small network of lakes that disappeared decades ago. These lakes were formed due to very heavy downpours similar to the current monsoons and lasted for several tens to hundreds of years. According to numerous evidences, these lakes were home to various species of flora and fauna, hippopotamuses Indian buffalo and other cattle lived here.

Evidence of human activity dating from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago – various tools and other things – has also been found, but no human remains have been found.

Oases are found in the Rub al-Khali desert. The largest of these are Liwa and El Ain. But the most picturesque, perhaps, is El Jiwa, which stretches for 50 kilometers.

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Vegetation in these parts is poor. Mostly – camel thorns and saltbush. And the animal world is not so varied. It seems that in the desert there is no one but camels, gerbils, snakes and scorpions. But there isn’t. In the Desert Park created in the Emirate of Sharjah, they decided to collect representatives of the entire animal world inhabiting Rub Al-Khali, and counted more than a hundred of its species, among which you can even meet the antelope Beyza. It has straight cone-shaped horns. The weight of such an antelope reaches 100 kilograms.

There are also salt marshes in some parts of the desert, such as Umm el-Samim in the eastern part of the desert. This area is hyper-arid, with minimal rainfall. Fauna and flora are also quite scarce here.

The population in the desert is nomadic, raising camels.

The main wealth of the eastern part of the Rub el-Khali Desert is, of course, oil and gas fields. Geologically, Rub el-Khali is the most oil-rich place on the planet. It is home to the richest oil fields in the world, and the oil is very shallow, making it easy to extract.

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Not only have many documentaries been dedicated to this desert, Rub al-Khali has also been mentioned in many fantasy and adventure stories, movies and even computer games.