Satellites Led Explorers to a Desert Ruin in Oman That May Be Ubar

Long before anyone looked at the desert from orbit, storytellers in Arabia spoke of a rich frankincense city that vanished under the sands. In the early 1990s, a team guided by space shuttle radar and satellite images dug at a fortified oasis called Shisr in Oman and suggested they had found it. NASA announced the result in 1992, and the site may be the legendary Ubar, often called the “Atlantis of the Sands.” The identification, however, is still open.

The legend of Ubar

Ubar belongs to the lore of the frankincense trade, which carried precious resin from southern Arabia to the markets of the ancient world. Legends describe a wealthy trading city that fell into ruin and disappeared beneath the dunes. Later tradition often links it to “Iram of the Pillars,” a city mentioned in Arabic tradition. Arkeonews notes that this link grew through later interpretation and does not come from the Quran itself. The explorer T. E. Lawrence reportedly gave Ubar its famous nickname, the “Atlantis of the Sands.”

A filmmaker, NASA and a new way to look at the desert

The modern search began with filmmaker Nicholas Clapp. According to a 1992 Christian Science Monitor report, he started gathering literature, scientific history and artifacts in 1983 and then spent about a decade looking for funding. He proposed that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) could help by examining the Arabian desert with space technology.

JPL specialists, including geologist Ronald Blom and Charles Elachi, studied radar data from the space shuttle alongside images from the Landsat and SPOT satellites and aerial photographs. UPI reported that scientists scanned more than 50 images of the area. The imagery did not reveal a buried city. Instead, it showed faint traces of ancient caravan tracks, and those tracks appeared to converge on one place.

What the expeditions found at Shisr

Expeditions in 1990 and 1991 followed the evidence to Shisr, a remote well on the edge of the Empty Quarter (the Rub’ al Khali) in Oman. There the team found a fortified settlement. Reports from the time describe an eight-sided fortress with walls and corner towers. Volunteers dug at the site, and the Christian Science Monitor reported Roman, Greek and Syrian pottery among the finds.

NASA announced the result in early February 1992, saying satellite technology had helped locate the site. Reports also described a striking detail: part of the fortified complex had collapsed into a sinkhole. UPI said the team concluded the city stood over a large limestone cavern that gave way. That echoes the legend of a city swallowed by the earth, although arkeonews cautions that the collapse alone cannot confirm a sudden destruction.

Why the story matters

The project became an early example of “space archaeology.” Remote sensing helped researchers see ancient routes that are almost invisible from the ground. Expedition archaeologist Juris Zarins said in 1992 that the site could shed light on the early trade routes that linked Arabia and Mesopotamia. The work also reminded people that a legend can point toward a real place, even when the real place does not match every detail of the story.

Is it really Ubar?

The honest answer is that nobody can say for certain. Clapp himself acknowledged in 1992 that archaeologists would not be “100 percent sure” until inscriptions were analyzed. Co-leader Sir Ranulf Fiennes also said the satellite images did not pinpoint the city. They mainly showed the team it had been searching in the wrong area, and he noted that some press accounts missed this point.

Arkeonews adds that the excavated structures did not match the medieval descriptions of Iram and that no inscription names the site Iram. Zarins later suggested that “Ubar” may have been a region or a trading people rather than one great city. In a 1996 PBS NOVA interview, according to arkeonews, he raised the possibility of a group such as the Iobaritae. Some pottery at Shisr also shows Parthian influence. Arkeonews summed it up well: the discovery was real, but its identification with the Atlantis of the Sands remains open to interpretation.

Whatever name the ruin deserves, Shisr shows how a story, a filmmaker’s persistence and a view from space can work together to put a lost desert settlement back on the map.

Sources

• NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory announcement (February 1992), as reported by UPI: Lost City of Ubar unearthed
• Christian Science Monitor, 19 February 1992: Space-Age Archaeology Digs In
• Arkeonews, 26 October 2026: Atlantis of the Sands: Arabia’s legendary lost city of Ubar