Geography of the Arabian Desert
As the name suggests, the Arabian Desert is located in the Arabian Peninsula. In fact, it actually covers much of the entire Peninsula– it’s nearly 900,000 square miles! It is so large that most people consider it as impassable.
The Arabian Desert shares both political and geographical borders with multiple countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen (which it borders on the southwest), and Oman (east). The Desert also extends into other neighboring countries such as Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and Iraq.
But don’t let the “desert” in its name fool you. The Arabian Desert is not a mere flat expanse of sand. There are mountains in the area, most noticeably along its borders. These mountain ranges roughly define where the Desert starts and ends. The highest point in the desert is Mount Al-Nabi Shu’ayb (with an elevation of nearly 12,400 feet) closely followed by Mount Al-Sham (elevation of roughly 10,000 feet).
If you zoom in on a map of the area, you can see that within those ranges lie the Rub’al-Khali, the largest continuous expanse of sand in the whole world. Most of the terrain in the Rub’al-Khali is covered with gigantic sand dunes, but along its middle can be found hardened areas made out of minerals. These were once the sites of the lakes that existed in the place more than two thousand years ago.