Palm Island in Dubai

The Palm Islands are artificial islands in Dubai, United Arab Emirates on which major commercial and residential infrastructure will be constructed. They are being constructed by Nakheel Properties, a property developer in the United Arab Emirates, who hired Belgian and Dutch dredging and marine contractor Jan De Nul and Van Oord, some of the world’s specialists in land reclamation. The islands are the Palm Jumeirah, the Palm Jebel Ali and the Palm Deira.

Each settlement will be in the shape of a palm tree, topped with a crescent, and will have a large number of residential, leisure and entertainment centers. The Palm Islands are located off the coast of The United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf and will add 520 kilometres of beaches to the city of Dubai. The first two islands will comprise approximately 100 million cubic meters of rock and sand. Palm Deira will be composed of approximately 1 billion cubic meters of rock and sand. All materials will be quarried in the UAE.

Among the three islands there will be over 100 luxury hotels, exclusive residential beach side villas and apartments, marinas, water theme parks, restaurants, shopping malls, sports facilities and health spas. The creation of the Palm Jumeirah began in June 2001. Shortly after, the Palm Jebel Ali was announced and reclamation work began. The Palm Deira, which is planned to have a surface area of 46. 35 square kilometres, was announced for development in October 2004. Construction was originally planned to take 10–15 years, but that was before the impact of the global credit crunch hit Dubai.

The Palm Islands are artificial peninsulas constructed of sand dredged from the bottom of the Persian Gulf by the Belgian company Jan De Nul and the Dutch company Van Oord. The sand is sprayed by the dredging ships, which are guided by DGPS, onto the required area in a process known as rainbowing because of the arcs in the air when the sand is sprayed. The outer edge of each Palm’s encircling crescent is a large rock breakwater. The breakwater of the Palm Jumeirah has over seven million tons of rock. Each rock was placed individually by a crane, signed off by a diver and given a GPS coordinate.

The Jan De Nul Group started working on the Palm Jebel Ali in 2002 and had finished by the end of 2006. The reclamation project for the Palm Jebel Ali includes the creation of a four-kilometre-long peninsula, protected by a 200-metre-wide, seventeen-kilometre long circular breakwater. 210,000,000 m3 of rock, sand and limestone were reclaimed (partly originating from the Jebel Ali Entrance Channel dredging works). There are approximately 10,000,000 cubic metres of rocks in the slope protection works.

The first thing comes to my mind about all the wonders of the world is the amazing ability of the engineers and architects involved in their constructions to come out with something which finally turns to wonder of the world. I also think that they might be built to let people from all around the world know about the country or state where they are situated. Let us take Dubai as an example. This UAE state became so significant when we talk about superb modern construction since the launching of it’s famous Burj Al-Arab, a luxurious 7-star rated hotel.

Then the name of Dubai continuously becoming well-known with numbers of modern constructions especially the unbeaten world’s tallest building,the 162-stories Burj Khalifa with 828-meter height which is almost twice the height of our Petronas Twin Tower, and also the unbelievable Palm Ireland. The Palm Ireland project was firstly thought as something impossible by some groups of people but the credibilities of the project planners are now proven with its accomplishment. The amazing ideas of constructing these crazy stuffs had drastically brought Dubai to world’s attention and this is a big bonus to it’s tourism sector.

Hence, wonders of the modern world can be said as the tourist attraction to the country or state where they are situated. However, sometimes I do feel that it’s such a tragic obsession when Islamic countries and states like Malaysia and the famous Dubai are spending too much money on these constructions while Muslims in many regions of the world are suffering from the violence of the Jews. So, I think it should be a limit for these crazy projects and let us start focusing the nation’s wealth to show our concern to Palestinians and all discriminated Muslims from various countries.