The green past of the world's largest desert

The Rub al-Khali desert in the Arabian Peninsula was once a verdant landscape with extensive lakes and rivers, according to research led by Abdallah Zaki, a postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin, with NYU Tandon as a collaborating partner. Their team reconstructed "an ancient water-sculpted landscape consisting of an expansive paleolake and related river deposits" in what is now the world's largest continuous sand desert. Assistant Professor Omar Wani contributed statistical analysis to the research, which has significant implications for understanding human migration patterns during the Holocene in response to regional climate changes.