Introduction

Kuwait, in the northwestern corner of the Persian Gulf, is a nation on the Arabian Peninsula. Nestled between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, a remote emirate, Kuwait is located in a part of one of the driest, least hospitable deserts on Earth. However, its shore surrounds Kuwait Harbor, a deep port on the Persian Gulf. There, a trading post was established by Bedouin from the interior in the 18th century. The word Kuwait is derived from the Hindustani kūt (“fort”) Arabic diminutive. Since the ruling family of the emirate, the formally established a sheikhdom in 1756, the fortunes of the country have been related to foreign trade. The tiny fort expanded to become Kuwait City, a modern metropolis mixing skyscrapers, apartment blocks, and mosques with time and accrued resources. Kuwait has the bulk of the nation’s population, rendering Kuwait one of the most urbanized countries in the world. In 1990, when Iraqi forces invaded and threatened to annex it, the tiny country, which was a British protectorate from 1899 until 1961, attracted world interest. Within days of launching an offensive in February 1991, a United Nations coalition led by the United States drove Iraq’s army out of Kuwait, but the fleeing invaders sacked the region and set fire to much of its oil wells (see Persian Gulf War). Kuwait has largely emerged from the war’s consequences and once again has one of the world’s highest per capita incomes. Its traditionally conservative government tends to provide Kuwaiti people with generous material benefits, and, while reforms such as women’s suffrage were opposed by conservative forces in its culture (women were not preferred until 2005), it has remained largely stable. In the middle of an otherwise volatile area, it was named a ‘oasis’ of stability and protection.
Slightly greater in size than the U.S. state of Hawaii, Kuwait is surrounded by Iraq to the west and north, the Persian Gulf to the east and Saudi Arabia to the south. With the exception of the Al-Jahrā oasis, at the western end of Kuwait Bay, and a few sandy pockets in the southeastern and coastal areas, Kuwait is mostly a desert. Nine offshore islands are composed of Kuwaiti territory, the majority of which are the uninhabited Būbiyān and Al-Warbah. Since prehistoric times, the island of Faylakah, which is situated near the entrance of Kuwait Harbour, has been inhabited.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia shared an area of 2,200 square miles (5,700 square km) along the gulf as a neutral zone before a territorial border was agreed to in 1969. Half of the region (called the Neutral or Partitioned Zone) is now administered by one of the two nations, but they continue to distribute oil output revenues equally over the whole field. Although the border with Saudi Arabia is established, there is a controversy over the border with Iraq.
Kuwait’s relief is usually level or softly undulating, interrupted only by low hills and small depressions sometimes. At Al-Shiqāyā mountain, in the western corner of the region, the elevations range from sea level in the east to 951 feet (290 m) above sea level. One of the major topographical features of the Al-Zawr Escarpment borders the northwestern coast of Kuwait Bay and rises to a maximum elevation of 475 feet (145 metres). Wide stretches of saline marshland have formed elsewhere in coastal areas. Throughout the northern, western, and central parts of Kuwait, there are desert basins, which fill with water after winter rains; historically these basins formed important watering areas, refuges for the camel herds of the Bedouin.
Either in the form of standing bodies such as lakes or in the form of flows such as perennial rivers, Kuwait has no permanent surface water. In interior desert basins, intermittent water courses (wadis) are localized and normally terminate. Beyond the surface level, no moisture is absorbed, with much being lost to evaporation. In Kuwait, real soils hardly occur naturally. Those that remain have no productivity in agriculture and are distinguished by an exceptionally low volume of organic matter. Eolian soils and other sedimentary deposits are prevalent and a high degree of salinity is found, particularly in reservoirs and other areas where residual pools of water are located. The widespread erosion of the desert’s solid surface layer, which kept underlying sand deposits in place, was one of the environmental ramifications of the Persian Gulf War; this has led to a rise in wind-borne sand and the formation of larger and more frequent sand dunes in the region.