The Arabian Desert consists of two major regions. The first, the ancient Arabian platform (a segment of the African Shield), is in the west. It is composed mainly of Precambrian gneiss (dated to between 2.6 billion and roughly 541 million years ago) and was assembled roughly 900 to 541 million years ago. The second region, in the east, comprises sedimentary rock layers deposited over the past 541 million years on continental shelves and within marine basins along the margins of the Arabian platform. Vast amounts of petroleum formed between those sedimentary rock layers, making the Arabian Desert the richest petroleum-producing region in the world. Roughly 33 million years ago, early in the Oligocene Epoch, Arabia began to split away from Africa. That was the onset of a period of rifting that was caused by upwelling from Earth’s mantle beneath the regions now lying on either side of the Red Sea. Between 30 and 20 million years ago, rising magma flowed to the surface as lava to produce flood basalts reaching thicknesses as great as 9,800 feet (3,000 metres). Those flood basalts now form large parts of the high mountains along the Red Sea margin in Yemen. Volcanism has continued on a lesser scale into the Holocene Epoch (the past 11,700 years). The upwelling magma caused the region to dome and rise. That action thinned and extended the crust to produce extensive fault systems along the Red Sea margin. By about 6 to 5 million years ago, rifting had progressed so much that oceanic crust began to form in the Red Sea to produce a proto-ocean (the early stage of a new ocean). Throughout that period of rifting, the Arabian plate has rotated progressively northward to collide with the Eurasian plate. That has caused the Persian Gulf to narrow, has scooped ocean crust from the Gulf of Oman onto the Arabian plate to form the mountains of Oman, and has compressed the Eurasian plate to form the Zagros Mountains in Iran.

Physiography

Mountainous highlands rise in the northwestern portion of the Hejaz region, in the Asir region, in Yemen, and in Oman. Lesser ranges have been uncovered by erosion in the interior. Eighteen volcanic fields are scattered through the west, mainly in Hejaz, several of them more than 10,000 square miles (25,000 square km) in area.

Plateaus are a common desert feature. Jordan east of the Dead Sea forms a moderately elevated plateau. To the southeast, Mount Al-Ṭubayq rises higher, standing as a mass of sandstone deeply cut by numerous wadis (ephemeral watercourses). Farther southeast the plateaus of Tabūk, Taymāʾ, Ṭawīl, Al-Ḥufrah, and Al-Hūj reach to the western edge of Al-Nafūd (or Great Nafud), a large sand desert in the north. Through central Najd, a highland region southeast of Al-Nafūd, a series of west-facing scarps are formed by cuestas (low ridges with steep faces on one side and gentle slopes on the other) of limestone reaching to highlands of the Hadhramaut in the south, where the plateau of Al-Jawl (Jol) is located. The Ṭuwayq Mountains are the most prominent of the cuestas.

Broad plains spread below the plateaus. Covered with chert, other rocks, or gravel, their surfaces are well preserved under the arid climate. Some plains are duricrusted (covered with a crust of soil formed by salts) and have smooth, firm surfaces formed by the cementation of sandy debris at groundwater level. Typical of the stony plains is Al-Ḥamād, which stretches from Al-Nafūd northward into the Syrian Desert. Chert plains were formed on the surface during the Oligocene in the Al-Ḥamād and in the Al-Malsūniyyah region east of the Khurayṣ oil field. The gravel plains resulted from deposits left during the Pleistocene Epoch (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago) by ancient river systems now represented by such wadis as Al-Rimah–Al-Bāṭin, Al-Sahbāʾ, and Dawāsir-Jawb, which carried vast loads of sediment from the interior toward the Persian Gulf. The Al-Dibdibah region once was the delta of Wadi Al-Rimah–Al-Bāṭin, and Al-Budūʿ Plain was the delta of Wadi Al-Sahbāʾ. The gravel plains of Raydāʾ and Abū Baḥr, and adjacent areas covered by sand, formed the delta of the Dawāsir-Jawb system. The remnants of several of the deltas formed by those ancient rivers are as large in area as the delta of the Nile River. The northern Al-Ṣummān Plateau is smooth where it emerges from under Al-Dibdibah gravels. Farther south, the surface is eroded into many closed basins.

Upwelling beneath the western margin of the Arabian platform has tilted it northeastward, creating a prominent regional divide along its western rim from Yemen to Jordan. In the south another regional divide separates the coastal drainage of Hadhramaut from the Wadi Ḥaḍramawt system inland, and a third system, also in the south, divides the Al-Jawl region from the system draining into the Rubʿ al-Khali. The Oman Mountains divide short, steeply graded, northeast-sloping wadis from the less steep wadis sloping southwest into the eastern Rubʿ al-Khali.

Lesser divides enclose basins in Hejaz, Najd, and Jordan. Four adjacent interior basins lie in the platform between latitudes 21° and 26° N. Others occur in the area near the Tabūk oasis, in the Wadi Al-Sirḥān, at the Al-Jafr Depression in southern Jordan, and in the Jordan–Dead Sea depressions. Hundreds of smaller basins, seldom larger than 4 to 8 miles (6 to 13 km) in diameter, are found in volcanic fields, in the shield, and in many poorly drained areas of sedimentary rocks. A few of those small basins are saline, but the vast majority are floored by silts deposited in thin layers.

Most drainage channels in the Arabian Desert are either dry or ephemeral, flowing only when rains are heavy. Two systems flow perennially in the region—the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and Wadi Ḥajr in the southern Hadhramaut region. The main drainage systems of Al-Widyān, Al-Rimah–Al-Bāṭin, Al-Sahbāʾ, and the Dawāsir-Jawb were the scenes of Pleistocene floods. Today floods are infrequent but no less destructive; they seldom, however, reach the desert sands where the channels have been dammed. The directions taken by several large systems have been altered by stronger streams that have intercepted them, including Wadi Jizl-Ḥamḍ in northern Hejaz and Wadi Ḥaḍramawt in the south.

Where they enter large expanses of sand, the wadis lose their identities. The alluvium carried in flood time is added to the sand body and redistributed by the wind. About two-thirds of the Arabian Desert is drained by complete wadi systems. The intermittent action of running water is more effective than the erosive action of the winds in shaping the landscape. The main exceptions to that rule are the formation of sand dunes and the grooving of rocks by wind-borne sand.

One of the special features of eastern Arabia is the sabkhah (or sebkha; saline flat), which usually is a gently sloping sandy plain located along the coast on which salt brine has been concentrated at or just below the surface. It is formed by the filling of embayments with sand—a process that continues as the sea level retreats—while the high rate of evaporation concentrates the trapped seawater to strong brine. Scouring of the sandy surface by shamal (north to northwest) winds exposes the salty crust, which may then be dissolved into brine by winter rains. High tides may spread the saline surface waters inland. The salt crust does not usually attain a thickness of more than three feet (one metre). It may be interbedded with sand, silt, mud, or other deposits formed by evaporation, such as gypsum. The surface of Sabkhah Maṭṭī, the largest single exposed sabkhah, is sometimes composed of soft, wet, muddy, and salty slush, with a hard crust less than three feet (one metre) deep. The feature is extremely treacherous to unwary travelers. The sabkhah surface is not akin to quicksand, but its danger lies in the inability of the traveler to recognize its nature in time to avoid sinking into a morass. Northwest of the oil refinery at Ras Tanura, sabkhahs carry a thin crust of salt and sand, underlain by soft calcareous (chalky) mud that is formed in shallow tidal flats by algae and eventually is covered by sand or salt. That mud has the consistency of custard. The eastern Rubʿ al-Khali has a broad sabkhah floor that rises to nearly 330 feet (100 metres), which seems to be the highest elevation that sabkhahs attain.

Saline basins develop in enclosed valleys, either from the evaporation of floodwaters bearing dissolved minerals or—more usually—from the evaporation of saline waters nurtured by nearby outcrops of salt. The Arabic name for that kind of salt flat is mamlaḥah. Arabs have quarried crude salt from both sabkhahs and mamlaḥahs for hundreds of years.

The sand cover of the Arabian Desert occurs as dunes of varying size and complexity or as a thin film on surfaces of lower relief. With few exceptions, sand does not accumulate in flat sheets but in dunes, ridges, or giant complexes. The variety of dune shapes and sizes in the Arabian Desert is legion. Many forms have not even been described in print. Contrary to statements by early European explorers—who claimed that the landscape there consisted of nothing but a shapeless sea of sand—the sand desert develops along systematic lines with distinct and characteristic patterns. There are also clear-cut genetic relationships between dunes in adjacent areas. In such huge sand areas as the Rubʿ al-Khali, the evolution of dune forms can be traced from simple dunes into the more complex types.

The two largest sand bodies in Arabia are Al-Nafūd in the northwest and the Rubʿ al-Khali (Al-Ramlah) in the southeast. Al-Nafūd has an area of 25,000 square miles (65,000 square km); the Rubʿ al-Khali has an area of 250,000 square miles (650,000 square km). Between them, extending roughly north to south, are two almost parallel arcs of more or less continuous dunes. The outer arc, convex to the east, is Al-Dahnāʾ, about 750 miles (1,200 km) long and from 6 to 50 miles (10 to 80 km) wide. The inner arc, shorter and less continuous, includes six elongated sand regions situated in low areas between the west-facing limestone escarpments of the central Najd. The two major arcs are separated by the Ṭuwayq Mountains, which generally trend north to south. Al-Dahnāʾ connects with Al-Nafūd in the northwest and with the Rubʿ al-Khali in the southwest. The inner belt grows more disconnected south of latitude 24° N and dies out before reaching Wadi Al-Dawāsir.

Al-Nafūd fills an irregular basin surrounded by hills, ridges, and buttes (isolated flat-topped hills rising abruptly from the surrounding land) or mesas (table-topped plateaus of relatively small extent with steep rock walls). Its sand was eroded and carried by winds from outcrops of sandstone that lie west and northwest. Al-Nafūd is characterized by a unique dune form, a giant crescent slipface (the slope on the leeside of the dune that approximates the angle of repose of loose sand, usually about 32°) moving through a thick mass of loose sand. The lee hollow in front of the slipface consists of bedrock, barren of sand. The impression obtained from an aerial view is of hooflike hollows, which extend from the southwest edge, well across Al-Nafūd. Along other margins of the desert and through the centre are seif (linear) and pyramidal dunes. Al-Nafūd has been a barrier to travel for ages; only rarely have non-Arabs ventured there. A caravan route runs from northwest to southeast connecting the oases of Al-Jawf with those of Ḥāʾil. The topographic relief of dunes in Al-Nafūd may exceed 300 feet (90 metres).

With an area exceeding that of France, Rubʿ al-Khali displays a variety of dune forms that appears to be unique, although parts of the Sahara show many similar dunes as well as a few that are different. The name Rubʿ al-Khali (“The Empty Quarter”) is not usually used by the Bedouins who travel over it; instead they refer to it as Al-Ramlah (“The Sand”). The Rubʿ al-Khali has five general types of sand terrains: barchan (crescentic) or transverse; seif; giant dune complexes, or “sand mountains,” that take the shapes of domes, pyramids, huge crescents, and sigmoidal (S-shaped) ridges; hook-shaped dunes; and dunes with vegetation and moisture. The eastern Rubʿ al-Khali fills a broad shallow basin floored mainly by sabkhahs that slope toward the southern shores of the Persian Gulf. The floor west of the 51st meridian rises to the southwest to nearly 3,600 feet (1,100 metres) and consists largely of gravel plains. Highlands surround the Rubʿ al-Khali on the northeast, south, and west. The greatest volumes of sand lie in belts within the eastern basin. Those belts appear to have accumulated during the Pleistocene Epoch in several stages as sea levels rose and fell.

Al-Sabʿatayn Dunes in north-central Yemen, in the lowland south of the western border of the Rubʿ al-Khali, cover an area of about 60 by 150 miles (100 by 240 km), or roughly 10,000 square miles (26,000 square km). Al-Sabʿatayn comprises mainly transverse and seif dunes.

Āl Wahībah Dunes are located near the extreme eastern cape of the peninsula. The area consists of an oblong dune field 60 by 100 miles (100 by 160 km) wide that is made up of linear ridges and interdune valleys oriented almost exactly north and south.

An elongated sand body named ʿUrūq Subayʿ (ʿurūq is an Arabic word for a region of sand dunes) lies in the southern part of the Wadi Al-Rimah basin. ʿIrq al-Subayʿ (ʿirq is the singular form of ‘urūq and is the source of the French-derived English word erg for large areas of sand), northwest of Riyadh in Najd, dams the middle Wadi Al-Jarab drainage system. A small cluster of broad transverse dunes has formed on the south coast east of the port of Aden.