Dust plume stretches hundreds of miles across the Persian Gulf

Dust plume stretches hundreds of miles across the Persian Gulf. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features the Persian Gulf during the summer dust-storm season in July of 2020.

According to NASA, the photo gives the wide context of the storm as strong winds raised a dust plume hundreds of miles long. Dust plume stretches hundreds of miles across the Persian Gulf

The image was captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as it lingered over southern Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Dust plume stretches hundreds of miles across the Persian Gulf.

The Persian Gulf  is a mediterranean sea in Western Asia. The body of water is an extension of the Indian Ocean (Gulf of Oman) through the Strait of Hormuz and lies between Iran to the northeast and the Arabian Peninsula to the southwest.^[1] The Shatt al-Arab river delta forms the northwest shoreline.

The body of water is historically and internationally known as the “Persian Gulf”. Some Arab governments refer to it as the “Arabian Gulf” (Arabic: اَلْخَلِيْجُ ٱلْعَرَبِيُّ‎, romanized: Al-Khalīj al-ˁArabī) or “The Gulf”. The name “Gulf of Iran (Persian Gulf)” is used by the International Hydrographic Organization.

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.

Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory 

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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer