Geology of the Oman mountains, Eastern Arabia / Геология Оманских гор, Восточная Аравия

Arabia is one of the most enigmatic and unknown continents on Earth. The vast Rub al-Khali desert, known as the Empty Quarter, occupying most of the landmass of Arabia was one of the last of the great continental extreme environments to be explored. Richard Burton, William Palgrave, Charles Doughty, Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark were a few of the redoubtable explorers who ventured into the vast desert wasteland of the Rub al-Khali, in what is now Saudi Arabia and the frankincense coast of Dhofar, Hadramaut and the Magreb (Yemen) in south Arabia. Although local bedouin certainly made long-distance camel treks across parts of Arabia, the first recorded north–south crossing of the Empty Quarter was achieved by Bertram Thomas in 1930–1931, described in his book ‘Arabia Felix’. This amazing journey was followed closely by Harry St-John Philby in 1932, who travelled west to east across the great desert. Wilfred Thesiger’s name is imprinted on the exploration of Arabia with his 20 years of travels, almost entirely on foot and with camels, exploring vast tracts of unexplored country mainly in eastern Arabia and his two great crossings of the continent in 1946–1949. His book ‘Arabian Sands’ is one of the classic travel books of all time. Thesiger was instrumental in discovering Fahud the huge folded mountain range where oil was first discovered in Oman in the early 1960s. Now over half the world’s oil and gas is produced from wells along the Arabian Gulf and eastern Arabia, from Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia through Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to Oman. <...>