The million-year accident: Biography of Strait of Hormuz, chokepoint that rules world

Born of colliding continents and vanished seas, the Strait of Hormuz is the million‑year accident that turned buried oceans into oil, and a thirty‑mile gap in the rocks into the world's most dangerous chokepoint.

The Strait of Hormuz has become synonymous with global fragility, Iranian strength and Donald Trump’s pain point.

To force the US into withdrawal, Iran has closed the Strait, a 30-mile-wide needle's eye through which approximately one-fifth of the world’s liquid energy must pass.

To understand why this narrow strip of water rules the modern world, one must look past the headlines and into deep time. Because the Strait’s role as a bottleneck was written in the Earth's crust million of years ago, long before the first human was born.

Six hundred million years ago, give or take an epoch, there was no Persian Gulf. There was no Arabia, no Iran, no Strait of Hormuz threading between them.

What would become the Arabian Peninsula was once locked within the great southern supercontinent of Gondwana. To its north lay a shallow tropical sea called the Tethys Ocean, separating it from the distant shores of Eurasia.

In the warm, shallow Tethys Ocean, microscopic marine organisms lived their brief lives and sank to the seafloor. Under heat, under pressure, over time measured not in years but in geological epochs, that organic matter cooked. It cracked. It became oil.