Saudi Arabia mostly does not have large single-cone volcanoes like Mount Fuji in Japan. ❌
Instead, most of its volcanism occurs in extensive volcanic fields called harrats, each Individual harrat contain many cones, craters, vents, fissures and Lava plateaus . Think of a Harrat not as one normal mountain volcano , but as a huge volcanic region containing many separate eruption points✅
For example, Harrat Rahat —alone— covers about 20,000 km², stretches more than 300 km, and contains over 900 volcanic vents.
Saudi Arabia has around 13–15 of those harrats , mostly concentrated in the west side of the country .
These harrats vary greatly in age and activity. Some have been quiet for hundreds of thousands or millions of years, while others erupted during the Holocene (the last 11,700 years) or even during recorded history.
A famous example of a recent eruption is the 1256 CE eruption of Harrat Rahat , it reached all the way to the edges of the holy city of Medina.
In 2009, Harrat Lunayyir experienced more than 30,000 earthquakes as magma pushed a roughly 10-km-long dike into the crust. Around 40,000 people were evacuated because of concerns about earthquakes and a possible eruption. The magma though stalled underground and no eruption occurred.
Below is the town that was evacuated in 2009. The volcano did not erupt, but you can still see black solidified lava from earlier historical eruptions surrounding the town.
That doesn’t mean an eruption is imminent in Saudi . It just means the geological machinery capable of producing future eruptions has not shut down.
This is the town that was evacuated in 2009 due to concerns of eruption See all that black rocks in the picture ? These are solidified lava from previous historic eruptions isn’t it cool
I already knew the Middle East, Mediterranean and North-East Africa are tectonically complicated and active, with the last region fissuring and the Mediterranean still closing (though slowly in geological terms).
I had not known about Saudi Arabia's volcanicity, though.
