It covers a quarter of a million square miles or 650,000 square kilometers. To put that in context it means that Rub al Khali is forty thousand square miles larger than the country of France! That staggering comparison makes it easy to see how the Empty Quarter earned the title of the largest uninterrupted desert on Earth!
The Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, known as Rub' al Khali in Arabic, is one of the least habitable places in the world. It is the largest unbroken expanse of sand in the world, and the Arabian peninsula's largest desert. Taking up much of the lower quarter of the Arabian peninsula, the Empty Quarter has an area larger than France, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined, covering some 650,000 square kilometers (200,000 sq mi). It stretches across the countries of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Empty Quarter
Though the Empty Quarter does have life, it has very low biodiversity. There are only 37 plant species, with 20 in the main body of the sands and 17 found in the margins. Only one or two are thought to be endemic. This isn't much, but it's better than nothing. Though vegetation is very sparse, it is evenly distributed, found throughout most of the quarter. Animals that make their home in this area include gazelles, oryx (antelopes with straight horns), sand cats (beautiful domestic cat-sized desert wildcats that get all their water from prey animals), spiny-tailed lizards, and many others.
@Terrificli -- It turns out that the government in Saudi Arabia has been trying to bring in companies to get at that resource in years. The idea is that natural gas could be used for heating homes, saving oil for other purposes (such as exporting and raking in piles of cash from the sale of it).There has been some progress in tapping into that oil, but the results have been mixed from what I understand. They will get to it one day, though, and that will be a boon to Saudi Arabia.Because the Empty Quarter is such a horrible place, it has not been explored real well for resources. Perhaps we will see more come from it in the future. Terrificli December 26, 2014 That part of the world sure as heck isn't empty when it comes to resources. This article points out the oil reserves, but there are also natural gas reserves in the Empty Quarter.A problem with those reserves is that they are hard to reach. One has to wonder if technology will find a way to unlock that resource in the future and what will be done with it. Post your comments Please enter the following code: Login: Forgot password? Register: (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle []).push(params: google_ad_channel: "1"); window.stockSnippets = window.stockSnippets ; window.stockSnippets['ss_rhs'] = ` `; By: Stefano Ginella The flag of Saudi Arabia. By: seqoya It is believed that what is now the Empty Quarter was once home to several cities that used caravans to trade among each other. By: Uryadnikov Sergey Though an extremely dry, mostly uninhabited desert today, the Empty Quarter was once inhabited by animals, such as hippos, that spend significant amount of time in the water. By: Bastos The Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia, also known as Rub' al Khali in Arabic, is the Arabian peninsula's largest desert and stretches across Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Categories
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The empty Quarter region is known as hyper-arid because it gets less than 35 millimeters (1.4 inches) of rain annually and has a relative humidity of 52 percent in January but only 15 percent in June and July.
Researchers also found evidence that the desert wasn't always so empty. As recently as 300 AD, the region was a regular route for trade caravans, with fossilised remains of hippopotamus, water buffalo and long-horned cattle suggesting that the desert was once far less arid.
THIS book embodies so many important contributions to the common stock of scientific knowledge that the reader marvels that one man should have been able, within the period of twelve months, unaided by public funds or private beneficence, to accomplish so much. Mr. Bertram Thomas, who crossed the great empty quarter of Arabia, an area hitherto wholly unknown, as great as France and Germany combined, just a year ago, approached his task in a purely scientific spirit, after years of patient preparation. Having learned on board H.M.'s ships to fix his position by the stars, he has produced an excellent map, full of topographical and other details, which would do credit to a trained survey party. He was at pains to measure heads with callipers, and to describe systematically the features of the tribes he encountered, hitherto wholly unrecorded, and in a valuable appendix Sir Arthur Keith and Dr. Krogman discuss the anthropological material he has amassed, on which they place a high value. Mr. Thomas collected everything he saw, and preserved his specimens so effectively that Dr. Caiman and his colleagues at South Kensington, who have contributed another lengthy and valuable section, have been able to describe a baker's dozen of specimens new to science, and very many hitherto unrecorded in Arabia.
Contrary to its name, the Empty Quarter is not really empty, but contains several rather easy monsters: Ratlin, Sandrats (spawning infinitely from Sandrat Nests) with a few Amarex and Basilisks mixed in.
The Rab al Khali can strike one as a very solitary and secluded region due to its name and also because it is one of the driest deserts in the world. However, the Empty Quarter has not always been this empty. Nearly 1700 years ago, this region used to see caravans crossing it as a part of the ancient frankincense trade. This continued up until the route became too difficult to travel through. According to scriptures, the lost city of Iram of Pillars, still exists somewhere below this red-hot desert. The city was lost due to the wrath of a God named Atlantis.
The Empty Diagonal is by no means the only part of rural France suffering from population decline. Other empty(ing) zones outside the Diagonal can be found near the Alps in the southeast and the Pyrenees in the south, among others. Zooming out, the Diagonal is part of a larger area of inland Europe suffering from seemingly interminable decline, extending to much of the Iberian peninsula, including the larger parts of both Spain and Portugal. 2ff7e9595c
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