47 Fun Facts About Persian Gulf

The 1991 Gulf War followed Iraq's invasion of which neighbouring Gulf state?

Kuwait was overrun on 2 August 1990 and freed in February 1991; the retreating Iraqi army set more than 600 of its oil wells alight, and the last was not capped until that November.

Which body of water lies immediately east of the Strait of Hormuz, on the way to the open ocean?

The Gulf of Oman takes every ship that leaves, and then the Arabian Sea; inside the strait itself the shipping lane in each direction is only about two miles wide, with a two-mile buffer between them.

Which oil giant began life in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, after a big strike at Masjed Soleyman in Iran?

BP became a state concern in 1914: the British government bought a 51% stake so that the Royal Navy, which Churchill was switching from coal to oil, had a supply of its own.

The Persian Gulf is ultimately an arm of which of the world's great bodies of water?

The Indian Ocean reaches it through the Arabian Sea and the Strait of Hormuz; so much water evaporates in the heat, and so little river water arrives, that the Gulf is markedly saltier than the ocean that fills it.

Which nation's only coast is a 58 km strip at the Gulf's head?

Iraq has about 58 km of coast in all, while Kuwait next door, a country some 25 times smaller, has nearly 500 km.

The Musandam Peninsula, cut off from its country by the UAE, gives which nation its only Gulf shoreline?

Oman's northern tip can be reached overland only through the Emirates, yet it juts into the Strait of Hormuz and gives the country a share in controlling it, along with Iran.

What are the Gulf's traditional wooden trading boats, rigged with slanting triangular sails, called?

Dhows were traditionally sewn rather than nailed: the hull planks were stitched together with coconut-fibre rope, and boats built that way carried Gulf trade to India and East Africa.

Which island's terminal was handling about 90% of Iran's crude oil exports when war broke out in 2026?

Kharg Island, a coral outcrop some 25 km off the Bushehr coast, is guarded so closely by the Revolutionary Guards that Iranians know it as the Forbidden Island.

Roughly how deep does the famously shallow Persian Gulf get at its deepest?

90 metres is about as deep as it gets, bar a few spots near the entrance: stand the 330-metre Eiffel Tower on the bottom and more than two-thirds of it would clear the surface.

Which river delta forms the Persian Gulf's north-western shoreline?

The Shatt al-Arab is the Tigris and Euphrates joined into one; a tributary, the Karun, dumps so much silt into it that the channel has to be dredged constantly to stay open to ships.

Which Arctic explorer, remembered in a Canadian bay, was killed at a siege on Qeshm, the Gulf's largest island?

William Baffin went ashore in January 1622 to measure a fort's walls so the gunners could find their range, and was shot dead as he worked.

A sea causeway about 25 km long joins Bahrain to which country?

Saudi Arabia is reached by the King Fahd Causeway; in March 2011 about a thousand Saudi troops rolled across it in armoured carriers to help Bahrain's rulers put down an uprising.

The World Islands, an artificial archipelago built for tourism, lie off which Gulf city?

Dubai's developer Nakheel piled up some 300 sand islands in the shape of a world map from 2003, but the 2008 financial crash stopped the work, and years later almost all of them still lay empty.

How does the Gulf's extra-salty water leave through the Strait of Hormuz?

Along the seabed: evaporation leaves Gulf water so salty and dense that it sinks and slides out beneath the fresher ocean water flowing in on top.

Nearchus, who sailed a fleet the length of the Gulf around 325 BC, was which conqueror's admiral?

Alexander the Great marched his army home through the Gedrosian desert and gave Nearchus the fleet; the admiral's own account of the voyage is lost, and survives only through later writers such as Arrian.

In 2012 Iran threatened to sue which company for leaving the Gulf without any name on its online maps?

Google replied that it simply did not label every place in the world, but its spokesman named no other place the maps had left blank.

The shamal, a north-westerly wind that blows down the Gulf each summer, is notorious for bringing what?

Dust storms are the shamal's trademark: the hot, dry wind blows almost without a break through June and early July, and its haze can grow thick enough to hide the coast from ships.

Which rival name for the Persian Gulf only caught on in the 1960s?

The Arabian Gulf label spread with Arab nationalism from the early 1960s, and the quarrel has teeth: the 2010 Islamic Solidarity Games in Iran were cancelled in a row over which name would go on the medals.

What was the Persian Gulf at the height of the last ice age?

A dry river valley: with sea level some 125 metres lower, the Tigris and Euphrates ran across a plain that may have sheltered people from the deserts around it, until the sea flooded back within the last 12,000 years.

Which civilisation, the world's oldest known, developed along the Persian Gulf and southern Mesopotamia?

Sumer raised Ur, Uruk and the other first cities on the plain at the head of the Gulf; the water that once served Ur has since moved away, and its ruins now stand high and dry.

What were the tar-coated hulls of 7,000-year-old seagoing boats found in Kuwait, among the oldest known, made of?

Bundled reeds left their imprint on one face of the tar slabs and barnacles grew on the other, which is how archaeologists know that boats built on this shore around 5000 BC really went to sea.

Dilmun, centred on Bahrain, was the middleman between Sumer and which civilisation?

The Indus Valley lay at the far end of Dilmun's sea lane, and copper was the prize cargo passed on to Sumer; the many thousands of burial mounds that still crowd Bahrain date from those boom centuries.

Which Persian king, who also attacked Greece, boasted of a canal from the Nile to 'the sea that begins in Persia'?

Darius the Great's boast survives on a pink granite slab dug up in 1866 by Charles de Lesseps, whose father Ferdinand was then building the Suez Canal, the modern heir to the king's waterway.

Which traveller reached Hormuz in the 1270s and judged its stitched ships 'wretched affairs'?

Marco Polo wrote that the ships had no iron nails, were rubbed with fish oil instead of pitch, and were often lost; he took the long road through Persia, and only came home by way of Hormuz and the sea two decades later.

Which treasure of Bahrain's waters, prized since antiquity, had made the island rich when Portugal seized it in 1521?

Pearls were still the Gulf's great trade four centuries later; then Japanese cultured pearls reached world markets in the 1930s and the old fishery collapsed, just as oil was struck in Bahrain in 1932.

Which English company's warships helped Persia take Hormuz from Portugal in 1622?

The East India Company struck while England and Portugal were at peace; to smooth over the scandal it paid the Duke of Buckingham 10,000 pounds, and King James I, who complained of getting nothing, appears to have received the same.

Which mainland port took over from Hormuz as Persia's main trade outlet after the island fell in 1622?

Bandar Abbas means Port of Abbas, after the shah who developed it; English traders knew it as Gombroon, and their price for helping at Hormuz was a share of the customs, which they went on claiming at the new port.

What did Britons of the early 1800s call the shore of today's United Arab Emirates?

The Pirate Coast was named for the Qawasim of Ras al-Khaimah, whose stronghold the British stormed in 1819; a later ruler of Sharjah, himself a Qasimi, wrote a history arguing the piracy was a myth.

By what name were the United Arab Emirates known under British protection before 1971?

The Trucial States were named for the sea truces their sheikhs signed with Britain from 1820; when Britain left in 1971 six of them formed the United Arab Emirates, and Ras al-Khaimah joined early the next year.

Which empire sent troops into Qatar in 1871, let in by the sheikh's son Jassim?

The Ottoman Empire wore out its welcome: in 1893 the same Jassim's men routed a force sent to arrest him, and in 1916 Qatar signed up for British protection instead.

The Persian Corridor of the Second World War carried supplies from the Gulf to which country?

The Soviet Union received more than four million tons of American supplies this way after British and Soviet troops occupied Iran in August 1941; the US Army later ran the ports and the railway north.

During which war did both sides attack each other's oil tankers in the Gulf?

The Iran–Iraq War spilled onto the sea lanes: Iraq struck ships serving Iran from 1981, Iran hit back from 1984, and by 1987 the US Navy was escorting Kuwaiti tankers re-registered under the American flag.

The US military shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 after mistaking the Airbus for what?

An Iranian F-14 Tomcat was an American jet: about 80 had been sold to Iran before the 1979 revolution. USS Vincennes fired two missiles on 3 July 1988, killing all 290 people aboard the Airbus.

Which country's navy moved onto Britain's old naval base in Bahrain when the British left in 1971?

The United States moved onto the old HMS Jufair site, and its Fifth Fleet was based in Bahrain when Britain returned in 2018 to open its first permanent Middle East base since that withdrawal.

The Gulf is thought to hold the second-largest population, after Australia's, of which seagrass-grazing marine mammal?

The dugong, or sea cow, grazes the Gulf's shallow seagrass meadows in its thousands; sailors' glimpses of the animals are believed to lie behind the legend of the mermaid.

Which emirate has the biggest known population of Indian Ocean humpback dolphins, a 2017 study found?

Abu Dhabi's survey teams told the dolphins apart by photographing the nicks and notches on their dorsal fins, and put the population at about 700, the largest reported anywhere for the species.

Which giant fish gather every summer around Qatar's Al Shaheen oil platforms?

Whale sharks come for the caviar: fish spawn around the platforms from April to September, and the sharks cruise the surface sieving up the eggs.

What do the Gulf's corals survive every year that would kill most reefs elsewhere?

Summer seas of 35°C are routine in what researchers call the world's hottest sea, yet one degree above the usual peak can bleach reefs elsewhere; the Gulf's corals house a heat-tolerant alga first named in 2015.

Which bird is the star attraction of Ras Al Khor, a wetland sanctuary in the heart of Dubai?

The greater flamingo shares the lagoon each winter with more than 20,000 migrating waterbirds, which break their journey at the head of Dubai Creek with the city's traffic all around them.

Which company struck oil in 1951 at Safaniya, the largest offshore oilfield yet found?

Aramco was still American then: the name is short for Arabian American Oil Company, and US oil firms owned it until the Saudi state bought in during the 1970s and renamed it Saudi Aramco in 1988.

Qatar's North Field gas field is called what on the Iranian side?

South Pars and the North Field are a single reservoir straddling the sea border, the largest gas field yet found, so both countries tap the same gas; an Israeli air strike hit the Iranian side in March 2026.

In 2002 the Persian Gulf nations held roughly what share of the world's crude oil reserves?

Nearly two-thirds of the world's proven crude lay around this one shallow sea in 2002; its oil is why President Carter vowed in 1980 to repel, by force if need be, any outside power that tried to take control of the Gulf.

In the early 2020s the Gulf shipped about a third of the world's exports of which gas-derived fertiliser?

Urea is made using natural gas, which the Gulf has in abundance; when war choked Hormuz at planting time in March 2026, Iran agreed to a UN request to let fertiliser ships through.

During 2023–2025, roughly what share of the world's seaborne oil trade passed through the Strait of Hormuz?

About 25% of all oil traded by sea, some 20 million barrels a day, went through Hormuz in those years; Saudi and Emirati pipelines to ports outside the strait could carry only a fraction of it.

Where does Kuwait, a country with no rivers or lakes, get the great bulk of its drinking water?

Desalinated seawater has kept Kuwait's taps running since the 1950s; before the plants were built, dhows fetched fresh water down the Gulf from the Shatt al-Arab, near Basra in Iraq.

Which Iranian mountain range, pushed up as the Arabian plate presses into Eurasia, flanks the Gulf's northern shore?

The Zagros are still being squeezed: GPS stations show the ground along the Gulf's Iranian shore shortening by up to a centimetre a year as the Arabian plate keeps pressing north.

With which ruler did Saddam Hussein sign the 1975 deal dividing the Shatt al-Arab?

The Shah of Iran won the mid-river border on what Iranians call the Arvand Rud, and in return stopped arming Iraq's Kurdish rebels; Saddam scrapped the deal in September 1980, the same month he invaded Iran.