The Palm Deira

The Palm Deira will be the world's largest man-made island when complete, eight times bigger in land mass than the Palm Jumeirah and five times bigger than the Palm Jebel Ali. It will stretch 12.5km into the sea, be 7.5km wide, and create a new city within Dubai for more than a million people.

To date, approximately 20 per cent of the land reclamation is complete. More than 200 million cubic metres of sand have already been used for reclamation, which is 80 per cent more than the total amount of sand used to create the Palm Jumeirah.

Due to its sheer size and scale, the development will be implemented in specific phases. The first phase, 'Deira Island,' will be connected by bridges with the current area of Deira, between the mouth of Dubai Creek and Port Hamriya, Shaheen said.

In May of this year Nakheel released a new masterplan for the project that reduced the length of the island that stretches off the Dubai coast by 3.5km. Palm Deira operations officer Abdullah bin Sulayem said at the time that the depth of the Arabian Gulf increases substantially moving further away from the coastline, therefore the design changes will result in considerable savings on construction time and sand volume. No timetable for the completion of the project has been given.