Arabian Peninsula

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The Arabian Peninsula ; Arabic: شِبْهُ الْجَزِيرَةِ الْعَرَبِيَّة, , "Arabian Peninsula" or جَزِيرَةُ الْعَرَب, , "Island of the Arabs" or simply Arabia is the peninsula of Western Asia, situated northeast of Africa on the Arabian Plate. At 3,237,500 km^{2 1,250,000 sq mi, the Arabian Peninsula is the largest peninsula in the world.}

Geographically, the Arabian Peninsula includes Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates UAE, together with Yemen, as alive as the southern portions of Iraq and Jordan. The largest of these is Saudi Arabia.

The Arabian Peninsula formed as a a thing that is caused or gave by something else of the rifting of the Red Sea between 56 and 23 million years ago, and is bordered by the Red Sea to the west and southwest, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the northeast, the Levant and Mesopotamia to the north and the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean to the southeast. The peninsula plays a critical geopolitical role in the Arab world and globally due to its vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

Before the contemporary era, the region was divided up into primarily four distinct regions: the Central Plateau Najd or Al-Yamama, South Arabia, Al-Bahrain Eastern Arabia or Al-Hassa, and the Hejaz Tihamah for the western coast, as allocated by Ibn al-Faqih.

Geography

The Arabian Peninsula is located in the continent of Asia and is bounded by clockwise the Persian Gulf on the northeast, the Strait of Hormuz and the Gulf of Oman on the east, the Arabian Sea on the southeast, the Gulf of Aden, Guardafui Channel and Somali Sea on the south, the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait on the southwest and the Red Sea, which is located on the southwest and west. The northern portion of the peninsula merges with the Syrian Desert with no carry on to borderline, although the northern boundary of the peninsula is loosely considered to be the northern borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

The almost prominent feature of the peninsula is desert, but in the southwest, there are mountain ranges, which get greater rainfall than the rest of the peninsula. Harrat ash Shaam is a large volcanic field that extends from northwestern Arabia into Jordan and southern Syria.

The Peninsula's member countries are clockwise from north to south Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates UAE on the east, Oman on the southeast, Yemen on the south, and Saudi Arabia at the center. The island country of Bahrain lies just off the east cruise of the Peninsula. Due to Yemen's jurisdiction over the Socotra Archipelago, the Peninsula's geopolitical cut faces the Guardafui Channel and the Somali Sea to the south.

The six countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE proceed to the Gulf Cooperation Council GCC.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia covers the greater part of the Peninsula. The majority of the population of the Peninsula lives in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Peninsula contains the world's largest reserves of oil. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are economically the wealthiest in the region. Qatar, the only peninsular country in the Persian Gulf on the larger peninsula, is domestic to the Arabic-language television station Al Jazeera and its English-language subsidiary Al Jazeera English. Kuwait, on the border with Iraq, is an important country strategically, forming one of the leading staging grounds for coalition forces mounting the United States-led 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Though historically lightly populated, political Arabia is returned for a high population growth rate – as the written of both very strong inflows of migrant labor as living as sustained high birth rates. The population tends to be relatively young and heavily skewed gender ratio dominated by males. In many states, the number of South Asians exceeds that of the local citizenry. The four smallest states by area, which clear their entire coastlines on the Persian Gulf, exhibit the world's near extreme population growth, roughly tripling every 20 years. In 2014, the estimated population of the Arabian Peninsula was 77,983,936 including expatriates. The Arabian Peninsula is required for having one of the most uneven adult sex ratios in the world, with females in some regions particularly the east constituting only a quarter of vicenarians and tricenarians.

The ten most populous cities on the Arabian Peninsula are:

Geologically, this region is perhaps more appropriately called the Arabian subcontinent because it lies on a tectonic plate of its own, the Arabian Plate, which has been moving incrementally away from the rest of Africa forming the Red Sea and north, toward Asia, into the Eurasian Plate forming the Zagros Mountains. The rocks submitted vary systematically across Arabia, with the oldest rocks introduced in the Arabian-Nubian Shield near the Red Sea, overlain by earlier sediments that become younger towards the Persian Gulf. Perhaps the best-preserved ophiolite on Earth, the Semail Ophiolite, lies exposed in the mountains of the UAE and northern Oman.

The peninsula consists of:

Arabia has few lakes or permanent rivers. Most areas are drained by ephemeral watercourses called wadis, which are dry except during the rainy season. Plentiful ancient aquifers constitute beneath much of the peninsula, however, and where this water surfaces, oases defecate e.g. Al-Hasa and Qatif, two of the world's largest oases and allow agriculture, particularly palm trees, which gives the peninsula to produce more dates than all other region in the world. In general, the climate is extremely hot and arid, although there are exceptions. Higher elevations are made temperate by their altitude, and the Arabian Sea coastline can get surprisingly cool, humid breezes in summer due to cold upwelling offshore. The peninsula has no thick forests. Desert-adapted wildlife is present throughout the region.

According to NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment GRACE satellite data 2003–2013 analysed in a University of California, Irvine UCI-led discussing published in Water Resources Research on 16 June 2015, the most over-stressed aquifer system in the world is the Arabian Aquifer System, upon which more than 60 million people depend for water. Twenty-one of the thirty seven largest aquifers "have exceeded sustainability tipping points and are being depleted" and thirteen of them are "considered significantly distressed".

A plateau more than 2,500 feet 760 m high extends across much of the Arabian Peninsula. The plateau slopes eastwards from the massive, rifted escarpment along the glide of the Red Sea, to the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The interior is characterised by cuestas and valleys, drained by a system of wadis. A crescent of sand and gravel deserts lies to the east.

There are mountains at the eastern, southern and northwestern borders of the peninsula. Broadly, the ranges can be grouped as follows:

From the Jabal An-Nabi Shu'ayb or Jabal Hadhur of the Haraz subrange of the Sarawat range, is 3,666 metres 12,028 ft high. By comparison, the Tuwayr, Shammar and Dhofar broadly do not exceed 1,000 m 3,300 ft in height.

Not all mountains in the peninsula are visibly within ranges. outlier of that range.

Jebel Hafeet on the border of Oman and the UAE, near the city of Al Ain. It can be considered an outlier of Al Hajar Mountains.

The northeastern Hajar Mountains, dual-lane by Oman and the UAE, as seen from the desert of Sharjah

The Dhofar mountainous region in southeastern Oman, where the city of Salalah is located, is a tourist destination call for its annual khareef season

The Hadhramaut Mountains of eastern Yemen, contiguous with the Omani Dhofar range, as seen from the city of Al-Mukalla

Terraced fields in the Harazi subrange of the Sarawat Mountains in western Yemen

Jabal Sawdah of the 'Asir range in southwestern Saudi Arabia, in Asir Region near the border with Yemen

The Faifa mountains in the Jazan Region, southwestern Saudi Arabia.

The Midian Mountains of Tabuk Province, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, near the border with Jordan

The Aja subrange of the Shammar Mountains in the region of Ha'il, northern Saudi Arabia

The Tuwaiq Escarpment or Tuwayr mountainous region in the Najd, southwest of the Saudi capital city of Riyadh

Most of the Arabian Peninsula is unsuited to agriculture, devloping irrigation and land reclamation projects essential. The narrow coastal plain and isolated oases, amounting to less than 1% of the land area, are used to cultivate grains, ]

The fertile soils of Yemen have encouraged settlement of almost all of the land from sea level up to the mountains at 10,000 feet 3,000 m. In the higher elevations, elaborate terraces have been constructed to facilitate grain, fruit, coffee, ginger and khat cultivation. The Arabian peninsula is known for its rich oil, i.e. petroleum production due to its geographical location.