40 Fun Facts About Arabian Sea

Bombay duck, a pungent sun-dried delicacy from India's Arabian Sea coast, is actually what kind of animal?

A fish, not a bird: Bombay duck is a species of lizardfish, and the odd name has been turning up in print since at least 1815.

Which river is the largest to flow into the Arabian Sea?

Indus is the root of the word India, though the river's lower course and its large delta now lie in Pakistan.

Which Portuguese explorer crossed the Arabian Sea to Calicut in 1498, opening a sea route from Europe to India?

Vasco da Gama made the crossing from Malindi in under a month, guided by a Gujarati pilot who knew the monsoon winds.

The Arabian Sea holds one of the world's largest 'dead zones', a deep layer of water almost empty of which gas?

Oxygen is so scarce in this layer that standard instruments sometimes cannot detect any at all. The zone is one of the three largest on Earth, and the other two are in the Pacific.

Unlike other humpbacks, the whales of the Arabian Sea, isolated for 70,000 years, never do what?

Migrate is what other humpbacks do between cold feeding grounds and warm breeding grounds. This small group feeds and breeds in the same waters, mainly off Oman.

Which Chinese admiral, whose treasure fleets crossed the Arabian Sea in the 1400s, took a giraffe home to his emperor?

Zheng He's fleet carried the giraffe from Malindi in East Africa, and the Ming court took it for a qilin, a mythical beast of good omen.

Which island, the largest in the Arabian Sea, is famous for umbrella-shaped dragon's blood trees found nowhere else?

Socotra's strange trees are named for their dark red resin, called dragon's blood, and the whole Yemeni island is a World Heritage Site.

The Carlsberg Ridge beneath the Arabian Sea takes its name from a beer company's foundation based in which country?

Denmark's Carlsberg Foundation paid for the round-the-world Dana expedition of 1928 to 1930, whose research ship discovered the undersea ridge.

The word monsoon, used for the winds that rule the Arabian Sea, comes from an Arabic word meaning what?

Season is the meaning of the Arabic word mawsim, which reached English by way of the Portuguese word monção.

Which traditional sailing vessel of the Indian Ocean carried Arabian Sea cargoes of dates and timber for centuries?

Dhow hulls are long and thin, built to haul heavy merchandise along the coasts of Arabia, East Africa and South Asia with a crew of twelve to thirty.

Which Indian state, famed for its Arabian Sea beaches, was a Portuguese colony for about 450 years until 1961?

Goa is also India's smallest state by area, with a coastline only about 100 kilometers long.

India's summer monsoon, blowing off the Arabian Sea, normally strikes the mainland first in which state, around 1 June?

Kerala's Malabar Coast gets the first downpours around 1 June, and by about 9 June the rains have moved up the coast to Mumbai.

Which waterway's opening in 1869 made the Arabian Sea part of the shortest shipping route between Europe and India?

The Suez Canal cut about 8,900 km off the voyage from the Arabian Sea to London by sparing ships the long trip around Africa.

Which narrow waterway, the Persian Gulf's only outlet to the open ocean, funnels oil tankers toward the Arabian Sea?

The Strait of Hormuz opens into the Gulf of Oman, the north-western arm of the Arabian Sea, and ranks among the world's most important shipping choke points.

Which Arabian Sea port, Pakistan's largest city, served as the country's first capital from 1947 to 1959?

Karachi is still home to Pakistan's two largest seaports, the Port of Karachi and Port Qasim.

What event in 2013 raised Zalzala Koh, a short-lived island of mud, from the Arabian Sea off Pakistan?

An earthquake of magnitude 7.7 pushed the island up within hours. Its name means Earthquake Mountain, and by the end of 2016 it had sunk out of sight.

Which Hindu god's legendary city of Dwarka, on India's Gujarat coast, is said to lie drowned beneath the Arabian Sea?

Krishna is said to have settled at Dwarka after killing his uncle Kamsa, and excavations off the modern town have found submerged settlements and stone anchors.

Which fragrant tree resin gives its name to a World Heritage Site in Dhofar, on Oman's Arabian Sea coast?

Frankincense left Dhofar through Khor Rori, a fortified port founded in the 3rd century BC whose ruins are part of the Land of Frankincense site.

Mumbai's Haji Ali Dargah stands on an islet in the Arabian Sea that visitors can reach on foot only at what time?

Low tide uncovers a narrow causeway with no railings. At high water the sea covers the path and cuts the shrine off.

Each winter, vast blooms of the plankton Noctiluca turn parts of the Arabian Sea which color?

Green is the color of the algae living inside each Noctiluca cell, and the same plankton flashes bright blue at night when the water is stirred.

Which strait, whose Arabic name means Gate of Grief, links the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea?

Bab-el-Mandeb separates Yemen from Djibouti and Eritrea, and bab is simply the Arabic word for gate.

Which Indian port city, a spice-trading hub since antiquity, is nicknamed the Queen of the Arabian Sea?

Kochi still lives by the trade: the Spices Board of India and the World Spice Organisation both have their headquarters in the city.

Which spice from India's Malabar Coast, shipped across the Arabian Sea to ancient Rome, was nicknamed black gold?

Pepper was prized so highly that Alaric the Visigoth demanded 3,000 pounds of it as part of his ransom for the city of Rome.

The North Indian Ocean's cyclone basin has two halves: the quieter Arabian Sea and which stormier neighbor?

The Bay of Bengal breeds most of the region's cyclones because the Arabian Sea has cooler surface water and stronger wind shear.

Which mountain range runs beside India's Arabian Sea coast, blocking monsoon winds and wringing out their rain?

The Western Ghats force the wet air upward so it drops its rain on the coast, leaving the Deccan Plateau behind them in a dry rain shadow.

The Sultan of Muscat gave the Arabian Sea's Khuriya Muriya Islands as a gift to which British monarch?

Victoria's new islands were valued for guano: Liverpool merchants dug out some 200,000 tons of the seabird-dropping fertilizer before the mining was abandoned in 1860.

Which Arabian Sea port on a hammerhead-shaped peninsula did Pakistan buy from the Sultan of Oman in 1958?

Gwadar had been an overseas possession of Muscat and Oman since 1783. Pakistan has since built a deep-water port there, near the oil shipping lanes out of the Persian Gulf.

Which Indian territory of coral atolls beside the Arabian Sea has a name meaning one hundred thousand islands?

Lakshadweep falls far short of its name, with just 36 islands and islets spread across 12 atolls.

Tim Severin's replica Arab ship Sohar set out across the Arabian Sea in 1980 with planks held together by what?

Coconut rope, nearly 640 km of it rolled by hand from the husks, stitched the hull together for an eight-month voyage from Oman to China.

Which island in Mumbai's harbor, on India's Arabian Sea coast, holds World Heritage cave temples dedicated to Shiva?

Elephanta got its name from Portuguese colonists, who found stone elephant statues at the caves.

The Somali Current on the southwestern edge of the Arabian Sea is known for doing what between summer and winter?

Reverses direction is exactly what it does: the summer monsoon drives the water northeast at up to 7 knots, and the winter winds send it back south.

Arab navigators crossing the Arabian Sea found their latitude with the kamal, a wooden card that slides along what?

A knotted string, held in the teeth, set the card's distance from the eye. The navigator fitted the card between the horizon and the Pole Star, then counted the knots.

Which admiral of Alexander the Great sailed a fleet along the Arabian Sea coast from Pakistan to the Persian Gulf?

Nearchus recorded the voyage in such detail that the historian Arrian built his own book, the Indica, around the account centuries later.

Ancient Greek sailors gave which name, literally Red Sea, to waters that included today's Arabian Sea?

Erythraean Sea was a label that once stretched from the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean, and it lives on in the name of the country Eritrea.

A seamount in the Arabian Sea honors India's C. V. Raman, who won the 1930 Nobel Prize in which field?

Physics brought Raman the prize for his work on the scattering of light, making him the first Asian to win a Nobel in any of the sciences.

The tidal beaches of Alang in Gujarat, on an arm of the Arabian Sea, are world-famous for which industry?

Ship breaking at Alang depends on the tides: old tankers and liners are run onto the mud at high water, then taken apart by hand once the sea recedes.

Which community of African descent held the Arabian Sea island fort of Murud-Janjira against every attacker?

Siddis kept the fort through attacks by the Marathas, the Portuguese and the British, and it stayed unconquered until India's independence in 1947.

Which Greek navigator does the ancient Periplus credit with finding the direct sea route from the Red Sea to India?

Hippalus was also the Roman name for the southwest monsoon wind, which trading ships rode straight across the open Arabian Sea.

Which Indian port gave its name to the 1509 Arabian Sea battle that secured Portuguese dominance of Indian Ocean trade?

Diu was where a Portuguese fleet smashed the combined ships of Gujarat's sultan, Egypt's Mamluks and the ruler of Calicut.

Mumbai's Marine Drive, a curving seafront road on the Arabian Sea, is nicknamed the Queen's what for its night lights?

Necklace fits because, seen from above at night, the streetlights along the three-kilometer curve look like a string of pearls.