An hour's drive from the city of Abu Dhabi towards the empty desert of the southeast will bring an unexpected human-made landscape.
There is a wonderful reservoir like an oasis in that area called Al Watba. It is said that the wetland was formed from a large amount of water accidentally released from a water treatment plant. Now there is lush greenery, flocks of migrating flamingos.
Trees lined both sides of the road, a surreal view of artificial mountains near the horizon. Enclosing that hillside with monstrous concrete walls.
Back lanes from the main road lead to wide, dusty camel tracks, where large fleets of the high-humped animals can be seen on cool evenings. They are being trained for winter camel racing.
However, what is most interesting about Al Watba is not man-made. These fossilized sandstones have been formed naturally for more than 10,000 years. These fossil dunes can give an idea of how the current climate crisis can give a new look to the world.
If you see these sand mountains standing high in the desert of Abu Dhabi, it will seem like a wave of sand has suddenly frozen in the middle of the turbulent sea.
A complicated story
The UAE authorities opened the area for tourists in 2022 as an attempt to protect these geological monuments that have survived for hundreds of years in the empty desert.
If the tourists want to frame their pictures by climbing the dune, they have to board a special vehicle to get there. There are informative signposts on the way there, which provide basic scientific information about the formation process of these sand dunes.
Basically, soil moisture hardens the calcium carbonate in the sand. And the strong wind currents of the desert have given these sand dunes all the strange shapes.
Professor Thomas Steuber of the Department of Earth Sciences at Abu Dhabi's Khalifa University of Science and Technology, however, believes that there is more to the formation of these sand dunes than that explanation.
Steuber studied those dunes during most of the lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. "It's quite a complicated story," he told CNN.
The Abu Dhabi Environment Agency said these sand dunes are between 120,000 and 150,000 years old.
However, Steuber said, these sand dunes were formed over several generations between the Ice Age and Ice Age cycles, which occurred between 200,000 and 7,000 years ago.
As frozen water rises in the polar regions, sea level falls. He believed that the dunes were formed by sand currents flowing through the Arabian Gulf area during that dry period.
As the ice melts in the polar regions, the humidity increases. Then the sea level rises again and comes to the level that Abu Dhabi is at now.
Sand is stabilized by the reaction of calcium carbonate with moisture. It forms a kind of cement, which then takes an ethereal shape due to air.
destructive force
Steuber said the Arabian Gulf is actually a small and shallow basin. Its depth is about 120 meters. About 20,000 years ago, at the end of the Ice Age, so much ice accumulated in the polar regions that water from the oceans dried up. This means that the bay was dry then, which is the main reason for the formation of the dunes.
Similar sandbars are found across the UAE, India, Saudi Arabia and the Bahamas. They probably took thousands of years to build.
56.010 SRY