The Empty Quarter

The Empty Quarter is located in the southeast of Saudi Arabia and is an important landscape between three other countries namely, Yemen, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Empty Quarter space outweigh the area of ​​600 thousand square kilometers, extends thousand kilometers long, and five hundred kilometers show. The weather in the Empty Quarter is hot dry in summers and rainy cool in the winter. The Empty Quarter lies in the dessert and makes it rare to search for animals or plants, Because of the extreme heat, animals and plants are slowly becoming extinct.

There are five types of sand landscape that was created because of different climatic and location factors. 

• The first type is Barchan dunes which are located in the northeastern side of Empty Quarter. 

• The second type is Star dunes.  This type is matchless because of the shape allows for wind to pass from all sides. 

• The third type is Domal dunes. These are scattered sand dunes because of different wind directions. 

• The fourth type is Longitudinal Dunes. There is no tall height, but the length extends to 100 meters.

• The fifth and last type are Sand Sheets. This type of landscape looks like a sheet of sand that covers the ground and it includes low hills  of The Empty Quarter. 

Creation of dunes through wind: 

A crew from the International Space Station took this picture above on May 16, 2011. Sabkhas, white salt flats, separate the dunes to the immense wind patterns that cause the sand to be organized and appear in a linear fashion. The linear dunes are oriented on the northwestern trade "winds" between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. The long, linear dunes began to diverge isolated large sand dunes to the northeast and east due to the result of wind pattern interactions and changes in the sand supply. 

The wind patterns in the area allow for the creation of dune because of the varying degrees of hardness and spread of sand in different areas. In some areas, the surface is smooth for a car to drive over while some areas can cause cars to disappear in the sand. The name Empty Quarter was derived from the hyper arid climate and difficulty of travel has discouraged people from making permanent settlements in the region. Can you stand in the middle of the dessert with  a 131 degree F heat with dunes taller than 330 meters? 

Works Cited 

http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/06/the-sand-dunes-of-rub-al-khali.html

http://ksalandscapetheemptyquarter.blogspot.com

http://www.sgs.org.sa/english/earth/pages/emptyquarter.aspx