Abu Dhabi Fossil Dunes: Beautiful frozen landscape created by climate change

Al Wathba, Abu Dhabi (CNN) — drive southeast of the city of Abu Dhabi for about an hour. Head to the empty desert of the Emirate. You will come across a landscape full of unexpected artifacts.

The area of ​​Alwasba has beautiful oasis-like wetland reserves, and the spills from water treatment facilities advance the story. It is now a lush terrain that attracts a herd of mobile flamingos.

Further along the road lined with carefully planted trees, there is a surreal place of man-made mountains that rises above the horizon, with huge concrete walls on its sides. It is supported.

Then, if you get lost in the back lane from the main road, you will come across a wide and dusty camel highway. Winter race season.

But one of Arwasba's more unusual and elegant attractions is not human work. Instead, it has been created for tens of thousands of years by the power of elements that were active thousands of years ago, but about how the current climate crisis will reshape our world. Provides insight.

Abu Dhabi's fossil dunes rise from the surrounding desert like fierce sea frozen waves of hard sand, with sides defined by raging winds. It is rippling.

'Complex story'

These proud geological relics haven't remained anywhere for centuries, but they're free in Abu Dhabi. It was opened as a tourist attraction. 2022 as part of the efforts of the Emirate Environment Agency to preserve them within the protected area.

Once upon a time, Instagrammers and other visitors needed an all-terrain vehicle up to the fossil dunes in search of a dramatic selfie background, but now 2 You can choose between two large parking lots. A winding road past some of the more spectacular landmarks.

Along the way, there are useful signposts that provide some minimal information about the science behind the creation of dunes. Basically, the moisture on the ground hardened the calcium carbonate in the sand. A strong wind then rubbed them into an unusual shape over time.

But that's not all, says Thomas Stever, a professor of earth sciences at the Khalifa University of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi. Dunes cannot be moved to other areas of geological interest.

"That's a pretty complicated story," Steuber tells CNN.

The dunes generation was created by the ice age and thaw cycle that occurred 200,000 to 7,000 years ago, says Stuber. More frozen water in the polar cap would lower sea level, and during these dry times, dunes would have formed when sand blew in from the drained Arabian Gulf.

When the ice melted and the humidity became high, the water table in Abu Dhabi now rises, and the calcium carbonate in the sand reacts with the water to stabilize, and then stabilizes. .. It formed a kind of cement, which was later whipped into an air-like shape by the predominant wind.

Destructive power

"The Arabian Gulf is a very shallow little basin," says Stuber. "Because it's only about 120 meters deep, at the peak of the ice age about 20,000 years ago, the polar ice caps were full of water and the oceans were drained. That is, the bays were dry. The source of fossil sand dunes. ”

Fossil sand dunes that occur throughout the Arab Emirates and are also found in India, Saudi Arabia, and Bahama took thousands of years to form. It's likely, Stever said. However, despite the official protections currently offered in Abu Dhabi, the erosion that gave each one its own shape would ultimately lead to their death.

"Some of them are very huge, but in the end the wind destroys them. They are rocks in nature, but sometimes they are hand-held. It can be broken. It's a very weak material. "

So in Alwasba, visitors keep some distance from the dunes, but still their coolness. It is far enough to appreciate the beauty.

Site tours are perfect for evenings when the harsh daylight replaces the golden glow from the setting sun and the sky is lilac in magical time. It takes about an hour to walk the sandy path from the visitor center or souvenir stall to the parking lot on the other side, and about 10 minutes to return with a shortcut.

The pristine tranquility of the dunes contrasts with the giant chain of red and white electric pylon that straddles the distant horizon at several points along the trail. This engineering spectacle adds a dramatic contemporary dimension to the landscape that freezes over time, rather than ruining the scene.

As the dusk settles, some dunes are illuminated, providing a new way to see these geological wonders.

Religious clues

"The dunes look really good," said Dean Davis, who visited the site while he was absent from work in Abu Dhabi. Said. Abu Dhabi city. "It's great that they were protected and the government did a great job."

Another visitor touring with his family, Ashar Hafeed said he was also impressed. "I saw it on Google, so I just had to come and see it," he said, adding that "one time was enough" to appreciate the dunes.

Stauber and his team at Harifa University have the potential to be repeaters.

"We continue to study them," he says. "There are many interesting unanswered questions about recent ice age sea level changes. It is very important to understand the current topography of the Emirates coastline. This is clearly an analog of future sea level changes. It's also. "

And Stever is the inspiration behind the story of Noah's flood, where the dunes appear in the three main texts: Koran, the Bible, the Law. A religion that emerges from the Middle East that says it may be evidence of.

"Probably because the sea level rose so quickly that this was the flooding of the Arabian Gulf at the end of the ice age.

"With the dry Arabian Gulf, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flowed into the Indian Ocean, and the current bay would have been a fairly fertile lowland that would have been inhabited 8000 years ago. I experienced a lot of rising sea levels.

"Probably led to the historical memory of the scriptures of these three local religions."