" A Gulf Oil geologist, Ralph Rhoades, a Missouri-born ex-marine inevitably called Dusty, had pinpointed a promising structure: a rocky, dome-like formation called a jabal, on Bahrain in 1928, before Socal acquired it.2 Then Fred Davies, a Socal geologist following up in 1930, had not only identified a well site on the Bahrain jabal but also had looked west across the strait to Saudi Arabia and spotted a cluster of jabals there as well. His identification would prove accurate: the Bahrain and Arabian jabals were related, both originally islands in the Gulf—the inland jabal now part of the land because sand had filled in the gap between it and the previous shoreline. "

― Richard Rhodes , Energy: A Human History