What created the massive reserve, and why does the middle east have so much oil?
In: Physics
Oil and coal formed from dead organic matter buried in sedimentary rock. If that happen underwater it will form oil, while if it’s underground it will form coal. That’s why we often get oil offshore from platform in the Ocean.
Now you ask yourself well the middle east isn’t an ocean so why oil there? Well part of that oil is underwater in the Persian Gulf or the Caspian Sea. That said, a lot of the oil of the region are found underground and the reason is that the whole region used to be an Ocean separating what would become Africa and Eurasia.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLahVJNnoZ4&t=195s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLahVJNnoZ4&t=195s)
Look at 3:18 this is 70 millions years ago. You can see that the Arabian Peninsula was part of the African continent at that point and that a big sea was separating it from what would eventually become Iran. The two continents become closer and the ground went up, pushing the oil reserves to the surface. Something similar happen where Texas is today, what is the Mexico gulf today went deeper into the continent at the time and almost divided North America in two. You can see that at 3:02 in the video and that was 100 million years ago.
The large financial reserves are from selling oil. The “large oil reserves” are a fancy way of saying they have a lot of oil.
Middle east has oil because of geological and climate things that happened millions of years ago.
In fact, Middle East is only important because of that oil. There are plenty of other places with endless & bloody civil wars or religious conflicts (Yemen, Somali, Congo, Libya etc.), and they receive a lot less attention precisely b/c they have no effect on global economy.
Moreover, if all that oil ended up somewhere else, there would be dictatorships and conflict there.
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