The Desert Of Southeast Arabia

This book describes in detail numerous geological sites throughout the mountains of Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in Eastern Arabia. The region is well known for its oil and gas reserves in the desert interior, and Permian-Mesozoic shelf carbonates exposed in the mountains of the Musandam peninsula, Jebel al-Akhdar and Saih Hatat, where deep wadi canyons provide impressive three-dimensional views into the crust. The region has numerous globally important geological sites, including the world’s largest and best-exposed ophiolite complex, the Semail Ophiolite, which is a vast thrust sheet of Cretaceous ocean crust and upper mantle emplaced onto the Arabian continental margin. Other sites include spectacular fossil localities, subduction zone metamorphic rocks (eclogites, blueschists, amphibolites), fold-thrust belts, giant sheath folds and Precambrian salt domes, as well as the huge sand dunes of the Rub al’Khali, the Empty Quarter, and the separate Wahiba (Sharkiyah) sandsea of Eastern Oman. Written by Mike Searle, who has worked on geological research projects throughout Oman and UAE almost every year since 1978, this book describes the field geology of each site and includes a wealth of maps, field photos and diagrams illustrating key features. It also discusses the history of exploration of Arabia and the search for its hidden geological secrets. The book provides the geological basis for the establishment of a series of World Heritage Sites, National GeoParks and Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) throughout the region. As such, it is of interest to geologists, tourists, mountaineers, trekkers, rock climbers and naturalists.

This is the first comprehensive survey of all the deserts of Arabia, based largely on the author’s 50 years of experience there. The text deals with every kind of desert in the region, from vast sand seas to clay pans and stony plains to volcanic flows. Along with dune types unique to the region the author outlines climatic changes, current ecology and human influence on desertification.

Title: THE SOUTHERN ARABIA Author: M. Meenachi Sundaram [Translator] TABLE OF CONTENTS Title: SOUTHERN ARABIA.. 2 THE SOUTHERN ARABIA.. 4 CHAPTER I: MANAMAH AND MOHAREK. 4 CHAPTER II: THE MOUNDS OF ALI 22 CHAPTER III: OUR VISIT TO RUFA'A.. 38 MASKAT. 54 CHAPTER IV: SOME HISTORICAL FACTS ABOUT OMAN.. 54 CHAPTER V: MASKAT AND THE OUTSKIRTS. 74 THE HADHRAMOUT. 84 CHAPTER VI: MAKALLA.. 84 CHAPTER VII: OUR DEPARTURE INTO THE INTERIOR. 96 CHAPTER VIII: THE AKABA.. 104 CHAPTER IX: THROUGH WADI KASR. 116 CHAPTER X: OUR SOJOURN AT KOTON.. 132 CHAPTER XI: THE WADI SER AND KABR SALEH.. 149 CHAPTER XII: THE CITY OF SHIBAHM... 168 CHAPTER XIII: FAREWELL TO THE SULTAN OF SHIBAHM... 192 CHAPTER XIV: HARASSED BY OUR GUIDES. 209 CHAPTER XV: RETRIBUTION FOR OUR FOES. 236 CHAPTER XVI: COASTING EASTWARD BY LAND.. 249 CHAPTER XVII: COASTING WESTWARD BY SEA.. 261 DHOFAR AND THE GARA MOUNTAINS. 269 CHAPTER XVIII: MERBAT AND AL HAFA.. 269 CHAPTER XIX: THE GARA TRIBE. 288 CHAPTER XX: THE GARA MOUNTAINS. 303 CHAPTER XXI: THE IDENTIFICATION OF ABYSSAPOLIS. 317 CHAPTER XXII: SAILING FROM KOSSEIR TO ADEN.. 328 AN AFRICAN INTERLUDE: THE EASTERN SOUDAN.. 340 CHAPTER XXIII: COASTING ALONG THE RED SEA.. 340 CHAPTER XXIV: HALAIB AND SAWAKIN KADIM... 352 CHAPTER XXV: INLAND FROM MERSA HALAIB. 358 CHAPTER XXVI: MOHAMMED GOL. 366 CHAPTER XXVII: 'DANCING ON TOM TIDDLER'S GROUND, PICKING UP GOLD' 371 CHAPTER XXVIII: BEHIND THE JEBEL ERBA.. 387 THE MAHRI ISLAND OF SOKOTRA.. 407 CHAPTER XXIX: KALENZIA.. 407 CHAPTER XXX: ERIOSH AND KADHOUP. 419 CHAPTER XXXI: TAMARIDA OR HADIBO.. 428 CHAPTER XXXII: WE DEPART FOR THE LAND'S END—i.e. RAS MOMI 440 CHAPTER XXXIII: MOUNT HAGHIER AND FEREGHET. 448 CHAPTER XXXIV: BACK TO THE OCEAN.. 463 BELED FADHLI AND BELED YAFEI 473 CHAPTER XXXV: EXPERIENCES WITH THE YAFEI SULTAN.. 473 CHAPTER XXXVI: AMONG THE FADHLI 489 CHAPTER XXXVII: FROM THE PLAIN OF MIS'HAL TO THE SEA.. 501 ABOUT THE AUTHOR. 512 THE SOUTHERN ARABIA CHAPTER I: MANAMAH AND MOHAREK The first Arabian journey that we undertook was in 1889, when we visited the Islands of Bahrein in the Persian Gulf; we were attracted by stories of mysterious mounds, and we proposed to see what we could find inside them, hoping, as turned out to be the fact, that we should discover traces of Phœnician remains. The search for traces of an old world takes an excavator now and again into strange corners of the new. Out of the ground he may extract treasures, or he may not—that is not our point here—out of the inhabitants and their strange ways he is sure, whether he likes it or not, to extract a great deal, and it is with this branch of an excavator's life we are now going to deal. We thought we were on the track of Phœnician remains and our interest in our work was like the fingers of an aneroid, subject to sudden changes, but at the same time we had perpetually around us a quaint, unknown world of the present, more pleasing to most people than anything pertaining to the past. The group of islands known as Bahrein (dual form of Bahr, i.e. two seas) lies in a bay of the same name in the Persian Gulf, about twenty miles off the coast of El Hasa in Arabia.

These proceedings record the results of climate change in many areas which are hyper-arid deserts today but which, almost cyclically, at intervals of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years, have had a much more humid climate.

This book will constitute the proceedings of the ILP Workshop held in Abu Dhabi in December 2009. It will include a reprint of the 11 papers published in the December 2010 issue of the AJGS, together with 11 other original papers.

In the heart of the desert is the biography of exploration geologist Mike Morton, written by his son who grew up with his father's stories and first came to experience the desert on their field trips together. Making use of Mike's journals and letters and writings of his contemporaries, the author describes his father's jouneys and what it was like for westerners to live in the Middle East in the post-World War II years. The book is also a history of oil exploration in the Middle East, relying onthe author's extensive research into company archives and eye-witness accounts of activities in the field. -- Provided by publisher.

The romantic landscapes and exotic cultures of Arabia have long captured the int- ests of both academics and the general public alike. The wide array and incredible variety of environments found across the Arabian peninsula are truly dramatic; tro- cal coastal plains are found bordering up against barren sandy deserts, high mountain plateaus are deeply incised by ancient river courses. As the birthplace of Islam, the recent history of the region is well documented and thoroughly studied. However, legendary explorers such as T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, and St. John Philby discovered hints of a much deeper past during their travels across the subcontinent. Drawn to Arabia by the magnifcent solitude of its vast sand seas, these intrepid adventurers learned from the Bedouin how to penetrate its deserts and returned with stirring accounts of lost civilizations among the wind-swept dunes. We now know that, prior to recorded history, Arabia housed countless peoples living a variety of lifestyles, including some of the world’s earliest pastoralists, c- munities of incipient farmers, fshermen dubbed the “Ichthyophagi” by ancient Greek geographers, and Paleolithic big-game hunters who were among the frst humans to depart their ancestral homeland in Africa. In fact, some archaeological investigations indicate that Arabia was inhabited by early hominins extending far back into the Early Pleistocene, perhaps even into the Late Pliocene.

This book is part of the International Association of Sedimentologists (IAS) Special Publications. The Special Publications from the IAS are a set of thematic volumes edited by specialists on subjects of central interest to sedimentologists. Papers are reviewed and printed to the same high standards as those published in the journal Sedimentology and several of these volumes have become standard works of reference. This volume commemorates the eclectic research of Douglas James Shearman into evaporites, which was initiated by his studies of the prograding UAE coastal sabkhas or salt flats that incorporate evaporite minerals which displace and replace earlier carbonate sediments. His subsequent proselytization of the study of ancient evaporites in sedimentary sections all over the world led to fundamental advances in our understanding of arid zone carbonate sedimentology. The papers presented here are based on presentations made in Abu Dhabi, UAE 12-14th October 2004 and 7th –8th November 2006. They provide a retrospective from the 1960's and 70's of Holocene evaporites and carbonates, recapturing Shearman's contribution by revisiting the Holocene coastal evaporite and carbonate sediments of the Arabian/Persian Gulf from Abu Dhabi, Qatar, and Oman. The first set of papers considers these sediments from the perspective of their coastal geomorphology, sedimentary character and their geochemistry. Later papers examine the significance of these settings in the ancient geological section world-wide, including examples from the Mesozoic-Cenozoic of the Moroccan Atlantic margin and the Upper Jurassic Arab Formation of the Arabian Gulf.