West Asia war: how finding oil changed the Persian Gulf’s ecology

Explore how oil discovery reshaped the Persian Gulf's ecology and sparked geopolitical tensions, impacting fragile marine ecosystems.

Military ships and oil tankers dominate how we imagine the Persian Gulf today. Yet beyond this familiar imagery of geopolitics and petroleum lies a mosaic of vulnerable ecosystems.

It wasn’t always this way. Just six decades ago, these waters were busy not with warships but fishing boats, and the glittering megacities that now line the coast were then little more than fishing villages.

The Gulf coastline is remarkably young. Formed 3,000 to 6,000 years ago as the sea flooded the Arabian basin through the Strait of Hormuz, it is today a shallow, semi-enclosed sea spanning about 226,000 sq. km, with an average depth of just 30 m.

Its shallowness and limited water exchange with the open waters of the Arabian sea drive its extreme conditions. The summer temperatures regularly exceed 35 °C while the high rate of evaporation keeps the water salty to the tune of 44-70 parts per thousand — almost twice as salty as open sea water.

Yet life persists.

At the boundary of land and sea lies the intertidal zone — shaped by cycles of exposure and submergence to heat and hypersalinity.