Considering oil forms under compression of trees and the like, doesn’t that mean there must have been a lot of life and vegetation there a long time ago? Why did all of that dissappear and only leave mostly barren wasteland?
In: 4590
As someone else pointed out, crude oil comes from marine plants and animals. So where we have oil is based on the shifts of tectonic plates and movements of the continents. Where the Middle East sits today would have been water. The world used to be one giant supercontinent and when they split into Laurasia and Gondwanaland they began to cover up spaces that were once purely oceans.
The Middle East is a barren desert because of the human influence, deforestation. The Middle East is widely accepted as the birth place of civilization (but China and India are about as equally old). Because of this most of the trees were culled to make homes, firewood, goods… and most importantly… weapons.
Most of the Middle East was deforested about 2000 years ago. In 63 BCE Rome conquered most of the Middle East and began exporting remaining lumbers to Rome. By the 19th century the last forest of the Middle East was in modern day Israel/Lebanon which vanished by the beginning of the 20th century.
Without trees there was no ground stability and slowly all of the life in the soil died creating a desert. One of the misconceptions about desert is that it’s pure sand. It’s not. Sandy desert is an incredibly small stretch of it that gets re-used at different angles for movies.
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