{"id":13222,"date":"2026-04-03T05:52:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-03T05:52:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/13222\/"},"modified":"2026-04-03T05:52:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-03T05:52:10","slug":"why-the-strait-of-hormuz-is-a-geological-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/13222\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Strait of Hormuz is a geological wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">The region is also known for its <a class=\"zZygg UbGlr iFzkS qdXbA WCDhQ DbOXS tqUtK GpWVU iJYzE \" data-testid=\"prism-linkbase\" href=\"https:\/\/science.nasa.gov\/earth\/earth-observatory\/salt-glacier-zagros-mountains-91264\/\" dir=\"ltr\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">salt glaciers and salt domes<\/a> created as the salt from deep within the Earth was pushed up through the folds created by the continental collision. \u201cIn places it literally flows down the hillsides like a rock glacier,\u201d Allen says.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">To the south, the Musandam Peninsula is part of the Al Hajar Mountains in Oman that run all the way down the northeast coast of Arabia. Those mountains are mostly composed of ophiolite, Searle says, a slab of the Tethyan oceanic crust and mantle that was thrust onto Arabia during a continental collision between 95 and 60 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. The same geologic forces that created the Strait of Hormuz also tilted the Musandam Peninsula eastward to the point where it pinches the Strait.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">Most notably, this continental collision also gave the region its staggering oil reserves.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">For hundreds of millions of years before the Arabian plate collided with Eurasia, it was sitting at just below sea level, Allen says, accumulating all the kinds of rocks needed to form oil and gas reserves. Over time, the collision of the plates trapped these pockets of oil and gas under the rocks in the northern end of the Arabian plate\u2014which now sits underneath Iran, Iraq, and parts of Syria.<\/p>\n<p class=\"EkqkG IGXmU nlgHS yuUao lqtkC TjIXL aGjvy \">\u201cWhat is distinctive about the Middle East is the sheer scale of it,\u201d Allen says. \u201cAll of this happened over a vast area, over a long period of time, with traps that are huge so that economically you&#8217;re not spending all your money drilling into a reservoir that&#8217;s going to drain dry in a few years, they&#8217;ve got fields that last for many decades.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The region is also known for its salt glaciers and salt domes created as the salt from deep&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[9070,9068,9071,8,9065,9,9072,9067,282,9069,7,9066],"class_list":{"0":"post-13222","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-arabian-plate","9":"tag-continental-collision","10":"tag-eurasian-plate","11":"tag-headlines","12":"tag-musandam","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-ophiolite","15":"tag-plate-tectonics","16":"tag-strait-of-hormuz","17":"tag-tethys","18":"tag-top-stories","19":"tag-zagros-mountains"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116339221658271559","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}