To experience the endless desert

The world's largest continuous sand desert runs along the Arabian Peninsula west of Muscat. Rub' Al Khali (the 'Empty Quarter') comprises approximately 583,000 square kilometers of uninhabited dunes in Oman and adjacent Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates. Professional photographers are entranced by the play of light on these undulating sand hillocks; solitude-seekers come here to sleep beneath the stars; but it's mostly a destination for experiential tourism. Desert journeys by 4WD meander along off-road paths across the Hajar Mountains before circling the dunes.

The basin's strata varies from the Proterozoic to the recent, with numerous cycles of clastic and carbonate deposits separated by regional unconformities. In the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic succession, the stratigraphic column has several layers of source rock formations, and reservoirs and seals are prevalent. The eastward compression of the Oman Thrust creates traps. The Rub' al Khali Basin is comparatively underexplored in comparison to the petroleum producing regions to the north of the basin, with two producing oil fields (Shaybah and Ramlah) and one producing gas well (Kidan).