A Rabbit Hole in the Desert

Woke up to a curious sight on my journey and did what any modern (amateur) researcher would do: spent several minutes tinkering the reverse image search to start showing me results that actually vaguely resembled what I had actually photographed.

This led me down a surprisingly deep rabbit hole, of harrats or volcanic fields across western Saudi Arabia. I was exactly that day years old when I learned about the existence of a whole new landscape.

Some of these fields are thousands of square kilometres and contain hundreds of volcanic cones, craters, and lava flows. Since I was travelling south-west from Medina, the somewhat lonely peak I spotted may have been an outlying remnant of the Harrat Rahat.

The truly unsettling part is that these volcanic fields are considered active. And not because it erupted recently in any human sense of the word (last in the 13th century for reference). In geological terms, active generally means it has erupted sometime within the last 10,000 years i.e., since the end of the last Ice Age, practically last Tuesday in the grand scheme of things.

The cosmos truly operate on scales unfathomable to the human brain. And for some of us, simply staring at a clear night sky is enough to induce a mild existential crisis.

(Only one thing manages to overshadow that absurd timeline: if someone had been earning a million dollars every week since the end of the last Ice Age, they would still be significantly short of Elon Musk’s net worth)

Back to the topic at hand. Interesting geographies are often tied to equally interesting histories. And that led me to a very fascinating youtube video by Dr. Hugh Thomas, a field researcher specializing in Neolithic-Iron Age tombs in Arabia. The fields are lined with burial tombs, hunting traps and of course scattered human remains in suspicious conditions. It’s difficult to imagine life in such a landscape thousands of years ago. Observing bottomless infinity in every direction would surely drive the human brain to try out unconventional things.

And to think that this entire lesson in volcanology (yes, it’s a real word), archaeology, mortality, and the alarming flexibility of the word “recent” began from an intriguing mountain-shaped silhouette glimpsed through a bus window.

Curiosity is a funny thing.