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Images from 1987 and 2022 compare Bahrain’s tremendous growth as a result of land reclamation on the sea.

Since the early 1980s, the population of Bahrain, an island nation in the Persian Gulf, has multiplied by four. In 2022, it rose to 1.5 million. As urbanisation and population density have both increased, so has the need for land.

Eman Ghoneim, a physical geographer at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, claims that Bahrain, like other countries in the Persian Gulf, has been forced to invest in large-scale land reclamation projects in order to extend its coastline due to rapid population growth, concurrent urbanisation, and land scarcity.

These photos document developments over a 35-year period. On August 17, 1987, the Thematic Mapper on Landsat 5 took the very first picture. The second image was taken on August 17, 2022, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) onboard Landsat 8.

Bahrain Island and Saudi Arabia were recently connected by the King Fahd Causeway, which first opened in 1986. The 25-kilometer (16-mile) stretch of road saw a record 2.5 million motor vehicle passengers in July 2022, according to news reports.

Since shallow coastal waters there have made it both technically and economically practical to produce new land from the seafloor, the north of the country is where change is most visible. In addition to existing islands being added, their size is also being increased.

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