INTRODUCTION
The world we live in is full of natural resources. And these resources can come in the form of soils, minerals, forests, fishes, freshwater sources, and oil. The growth of civilization depended and still depends on the availability of these resources. Freshwater sources for instance provided early civilizations reliable fish, fertile land, and importantly navigable waters for transportation and trade. It’s easy to forget, but the movement of people and goods from one location to another has not always been an easy task. Before the industrial revolution, which gave us cars and trains, the movement of people and goods relied heavily upon the tenacity of beast of burdens like horses and camels, and also upon the successful navigation of wooden ships across vast stretches of water. The industrial revolution however changed this. With the invention of cars and trains in the late nineteen-hundreds, movement across vast distances of land became possible and easier. Such an increase in mobility led to the growth of both domestic and international trade. With more goods coming and going from an industrialized country to another, the importance of a powerful naval fleet became even more pronounced.
Naval fleets have always existed since the first ships were invented. Empires and Dynasties waged war on the sea in an attempt to protect or gain more land -- and even more importantly, protect their trading routes. Simply put, those who ruled the sea, ruled the world. At the onset of the industrial revolution, this truth became even more evident. With increasing international trade came a necessity to protect and rule the seas through which a country, a powerful country for that matter, traded. The British Empire, at the time being the indisputable global hegemon, had a strong naval fleet. But an increase in trade, and the threat of competitors like the United States and Germany led to a need to improve naval ships. And this improvement came in the form of petroleum. Before naval ships used oil, they used coal. In fact, coal was used as the primary source of fuel during the industrial revolution. For navy ships, however, using coal as a fuel source was not only inefficient, it was also quite scary. In naval warfare, speed matters and so does stealth. Coal offered no speed because it took 4 hours for it to propel a naval ship to full speed. And neither did it offer stealth. Smoke coming out of a naval ship gave away its position. Oil on the other hand offered naval ships incredible speeds. It only took 30 minutes for a ship to be at full speed and oil didn’t give away any smoke. Lord Jack Fischer of the British Royal Navy, merely a Captain in the late 1800s, advocated heavily for the transition from coal to oil powered naval ships. With oil as the primary source of fuel, the British Royal Navy no longer needed to clench its sphincter as it reloaded at one of its numerous coal filling stations spread across its territories. Britain’s transition from coal to oil was followed suit by the United States, and since then, controlling oil-rich areas has become the greatest foreign policy for both nations. With oil, navy ships advanced in capability and efficiency. Protecting trade routes and national waters became easier, and so did naval warfare. Navy ships were however not the only benefactors of oil. Before the first navy ships even started using oil, it was being used heavily in automobiles in the United States. The boom of the automobile industry meant faster transportation for American car owners, and in the face of this increasingly affordable mobility, lots and lots of cars were bought, which meant an increasing reliance on oil, and a greater desire to control oil-rich areas like the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East.
The world we live in is full of natural resources. And these resources can come in the form of soils, minerals, forests, fishes, freshwater sources, and oil. The growth of civilization depended and still depends on the availability of these resources. Freshwater sources for instance provided early civilizations reliable fish, fertile land, and importantly navigable waters for transportation and trade. It’s easy to forget, but the movement of people and goods from one location to another has not always been an easy task. Before the industrial revolution, which gave us cars and trains, the movement of people and goods relied heavily upon the tenacity of beast of burdens like horses and camels, and also upon the successful navigation of wooden ships across vast stretches of water. The industrial revolution however changed this. With the invention of cars and trains in the late nineteen-hundreds, movement across vast distances of land became possible and easier. Such an increase in mobility led to the growth of both domestic and international trade. With more goods coming and going from an industrialized country to another, the importance of a powerful naval fleet became even more pronounced.
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| Britain Royal Navy battling against French Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar. This battle cemented Britain as the indisputable ruler of the sea. |
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| When cars started gaining traction amongst the populous, Ford Motors started experimenting with petroleum/oil run cars. |
THE ARABIAN PENINSULA
Oil is an indispensable natural resource. The world we live in is one that depends on it. Not only is it an incredible fuel source, it is also used in products like phones, computers, and a vast array of plastic products. The United States alone accounts for 21% of the world’s petroleum consumption, with the closest country, China, accounting for 12%. Oil changed the United States and it depends on it to survive. Statements about the United States waging war on unsuspected countries containing even the slightest bit of oil does have some truth to it. Without oil, the transportation efficiency of the United States will drop and this will have devastating effects on its economy. The United States however does not stand alone in having been drastically changed by oil.
The entirety of the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East have been altered by the discovery of the vast oil and gas reserves upon which they lay. Before the 20th century, the Arabian Peninsula was a desolate landscape avoided by most Arabs, but with the discovery of oil on March 8th 1938 by the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, the wild and harsh deserts turned into gold, black gold. The Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, according to the British Petroleum Review of World Energy, contains 48% of the world’s oil reserves and 38% of its natural gas reserves. With this much ownership of a crucial natural resource, the Arabian Peninsula underwent a drastic transformation. Before 1938, the countries that make up the Peninsula, namely Saudi Arabia, were some of the poorest in the world. The Peninsula was also war torn and unstable. The discovery of oil has changed the face of the Peninsula. Today, the nations within the Peninsula, namely Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and Qatar have become some of the most energy hungry countries in the world. Impeccable education, transportation and architecture has also become the norm. Oil has made these countries extremely rich, and with the entire world depending on oil, the Arabian world is undergoing one of the most rapid and drastic economic and cultural changes. But none of these would have happened if not for the geologic setting in which these rich Arab countries lie.
GEOLOGY
Natural resources go hand in hand with Geology and geologic processes. The Great Lakes of Africa for instance, were created by the ongoing rift separating the Nubian Plate from the Somalian Plate. The vast oil reserves in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East also originate from Geologic processes. For oil to form, organic matter and tremendous heats and pressures are required. And these are conditions the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East had millions and millions of years back. Let’s go back in time, all the way back to the Paleozoic, 541 million years ago. This was the start of the Phanerozoic Eon, and it started with the diversification of life, an explosion of life commonly referred to as the Cambrian Explosion. Phylums like the Cnidaria, Arthropoda, Porifera, Mollusca, Branchiopoda, Echinodermata, and Annelida showed up at this time. For the next 289 million years, as these phylums lived and died and deposited organic matter into the oceans, the continents were also moving towards the formation of the supercontinent known as Pangea. The formation of Pangea also led to the formation of the Tethys Ocean. And this is where the story of the Arab world’s vast oil reserves begin.
THE TETHYS OCEAN
The formation of the Tethys Ocean occurred towards the end of the Paleozoic Periods, late in the Permian Period. This Tethys Ocean was the first of three. Commonly referred to as the Paleo-Tethys, this ocean became a haven for marine creatures. With Pangea’s formation, a vast network of continental shelves became home to sea creatures. Here on the continental shelves, they lived and died in assemblages, and their organic matter was buried by sediments transported into the oceans by wind, ice, water and gravity. At the end of the Paleozoic Periods and transitioning into the Mesozoic Periods, there was a mass extinction event that wiped out 95% of marine species. Trilobites, the most successful of early animals, went extinct during this event. The mass extinction of marine species meant more organic matter for the continental shelves of the Paleo-Tethys Ocean. Despite this mass extinction event, 70% of the oil and gas reserves found within the Arabian Peninsula and Middle East were created later in the Mesozoic Period as Pangea separated into Laurasia and Gondwana -- giving way to the new Tethys, the Neo-Tethys Sea.
During much of the Mesozoic, The Arabian Peninsula was submerged underwater. It was a part of the Neo-Tethys continental shelf and was home to the new diversification of life following the Permian-Triassic Extinction. The Mesozoic in general experienced high sea levels, and with the Neo-Tethys being situated right along the warm, organic rich equator, life strived. Plankton, the potato chips of the sea, strived the most. The explanation for this radiation of plankton can be seen in this picture. See, when continents move, they are being moved by tectonic plates. Mountains, trenches and ocean-ridges are formed as these tectonic plates move. When plates move away from each other, they form ocean-ridges and such an ocean ridge can be seen today in Iceland, where the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is splitting the island apart. The high concentration of volcanoes in this region is due to this tectonic event.
The Mesozoic Period experienced this on a much larger scale. As Pangea split apart in the Triassic, followed by Africa splitting from South America in the Jurassic and Cretaceous, volcanic activity became prevalent. This warmed the oceans tremendously and importantly provided Plankton with an incredible source of nutrients from the minerals being pumped into the ocean by volcanoes.
With warm waters and an abundance of nutrients, plankton lived and died in the millions in the Tethys Sea and were quickly piled upon by the rich sedimentation processes afforded by high sea levels.
With rapid sedimentation, warm waters, a large continental shelf and the tectonic advancement into the continental formations we know today, the Arabian Peninsula had all the geologic and structural events required to make oil, and lots of it. When the Arabian Plate moved into the Eurasian plate, the organic rich sediments formed throughout the Paleozoic and Mesozoic were covered by more sediments as the collision of the Arabian and Eurasian plate deformed and created the Zagros Mountains. With this collision, more pressure was added, and structural traps were formed to preserve the oil being generated from millions of years of organic decay.
LAST WORDS
When oil was discovered at the Peninsula in 1938 by America, the Arabian countries struck it rich. With these large reserves of oil and natural gas in their possession, the entire region became the single most important geological and geopolitical area in human history. Of course, there are other locations in the world with the remaining reserves of the world’s oil and gas, but the accessibility of these reserves, compared to those in the Arabian Peninsula and Middle East, are technologically more complex, and sometimes downright inaccessible. The United States constant involvement in the Middle East, and its tight friendship with Saudi Arabia is due to this indispensable natural resource and the ease of access to it in the region.
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