City lights surround the Persian Gulf
City lights surround the Persian Gulf. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features a nighttime view of the coastal cities surrounding the Persian Gulf.
According to NASA, the lights represent the countries of Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
Along the southern and western coastlines, the major cities of Doha, Abu Dhabi, Kuwait City, and Dubai stand out with the brightest lights. On the northern coast, smaller port cities are visible.
The coastal areas of the Persian Gulf, a shallow marginal sea of the Indian Ocean.
are considered to be the largest source of crude oil in the world.
Millions of barrels of crude oil and petroleum are shipped on a daily basis through the Strait of Hormuz, which connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman. City lights surround the Persian Gulf.
The Persian Gulf was a battlefield of the 1980–1988 Iran–Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other’s oil tankers. It is the namesake of the 1991 Gulf War, the largely air- and land-based conflict that followed Iraq‘s invasion of Kuwait.
The Persian Gulf has many fishing grounds, extensive reefs (mostly rocky, but also coral), and abundant pearl oysters, but its ecology has been damaged by industrialization and oil spills.
The Persian Gulf is in the Persian Gulf Basin, which is of Cenozoic origin and related to the subduction of the Arabian Plate under the Zagros Mountains. The current flooding of the basin started 15,000 years ago due to rising sea levels of the Holocene glacial retreat
The image was captured on August 31, 2020 by an astronaut onboard the International Space Station.
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
