{"id":352350,"date":"2026-03-28T14:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T14:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/352350\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T14:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T14:33:09","slug":"its-an-unforgiving-harsh-remote-arid-landscape-the-size-of-texas-that-receives-just-a-few-millimetres-of-rain-a-year-yet-remarkably-some-wild-animals-live-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/352350\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s an unforgiving, harsh, remote arid landscape the size of Texas that receives just a few millimetres of rain a year – yet remarkably some wild animals live here…"},"content":{"rendered":"

An almost incomprehensible 650,000km2\u00a0\u2013\u00a0that\u2019s roughly the size of Texas \u2013\u00a0of sand dunes and little else. That\u2019s the Rub\u2019 al Khali, which translates poetically and fittingly as the Empty Quarter.<\/p>\n

The area receives just a few millimetres of rain a year, half that of the infamously arid Death Valley, and yet despite its incredible harshness, humans have breached its deepest interiors.<\/p>\n

A number of tribes people live in and around the Empty Quarter, and the English explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger made two crossings in the late 1940s, stories he details in his classic of travel literature,\u00a0Arabian Sands.<\/p>\n

Some writers such as Bertram Thomas became convinced there was a ruined city hidden in the innumerable dunes, a place he dubbed the Atlantis of the Sands, also known in Arabic as\u00a0Ubar\u00a0or\u00a0Wabar, but beyond the odd tumbledown fort, little of note has been discovered.<\/p>\n

\"\"Arabian oryx: Nimit Virdi \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n

There is wildlife here, too. Arabian oryx<\/a>, sand gazelles and red-necked ostriches<\/a> have been reintroduced to the Shaybah Wildlife Sanctuary on the eastern edge of Rub\u2019 al Khali, and more than 600km2\u00a0are being restored by preventing damaging activities such as firewood collection, hunting and off-road driving, allowing flora and fauna to flourish again, even in this most hostile of environments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The conservation biologist James Borrell writes describes how on his trip into the Empty Quarter they explored the dunes at dawn and were surprised to discover they were criss-crossed with footprints, “the tell-tale signs of life just feet from where we had laid,\u201d animals they had neither seen nor heard heading they knew not where.<\/p>\n

\"\"R\u00fcppell\u2019s sand fox: HelmutBoehm, CC BY-SA 3.0 https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by-sa\/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

They put out remote cameras, and these captured an inquisitive R\u00fcppell\u2019s sand fox, hares and signs of an Arabian spiny-tailed lizard. One morning, he awoke to find a camel <\/a>peering down at him, while others rummaged through their food supplies for something to eat.<\/p>\n

You can follow in Thesiger\u2019s and Thomas\u2019 footsteps if you desire \u2013\u00a0or just about. No one is going to take you all the way across the Empty Quarter, but you can explore it from Oman with one tour operator, leaving from Salalah on the coast, driving north on increasingly bumpy roads.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know you’ve arrived in the Empty Quarter proper when the roads have disappeared and there’s nothing but enormous sand dunes in all directions,\u201d says its website.<\/p>\n

A forbidding but unforgettable landscape awaits \u2013\u00a0just don\u2019t forget your water bottle.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An almost incomprehensible 650,000km2\u00a0\u2013\u00a0that\u2019s roughly the size of Texas \u2013\u00a0of sand dunes and little else. That\u2019s the Rub\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352351,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-352350","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}