This desert locust crisis traces back to May 2018, when Cyclone Mekunu passed over a vast, unpopulated desert on the southern Arabian Peninsula known as the Rub' al Khali, filling the space between sand dunes with ephemeral lakes, which allowed locusts to breed undetected. This was further amplified in October 2018 by Cyclone Luban, which spawned in the central Arabian Sea, marched westward, and rained out over the same region near the border of Yemen and Oman. These unusually heavy rains were tied to fluctuations in the Indian Ocean Dipole, which in turn is affected by climate change. Historically, the Persian Gulf has very few cyclones. But the past decade has brought a significant increase because of the Indian Ocean dipole, a phenomenon linked to flooding in the western Indian Ocean, dry weather in the east and bushfires in Australia.