The Quranic account of the Children of Israel crossing the sea is one of the most detailed episodes in the Quran. It does not merely mention a crossing: it describes a sea that splits, two raised walls, a dry path, and then the drowning of Pharaoh and his armies.
In Surah Ash-Shu'ara (26:63), Allah says:
"Then We inspired to Moses: 'Strike the sea with your staff.' And it split, and each part was like a huge mountain."
Surah Ta-Ha (20:77) specifies the nature of the passage:
"And We inspired to Moses: 'Travel by night with My servants and strike for them a dry path in the sea...'"
The text thus insists on two elements: a dry path (يَبَسًا, yabasan) and walls raised like mountains. These two details have fed a geographical and oceanographic research hypothesis.
The Nuweiba hypothesis
A hypothesis, popularised by researchers and popularisers such as Ron Wyatt and later documented by Lennart Möller in The Exodus Case (2002), locates the crossing not at the Gulf of Suez but further east, at Nuweiba, on the coast of the Gulf of Aqaba.
The main argument is bathymetric: between Nuweiba and the Saudi coast (the Haql area), the floor of the Gulf of Aqaba shows a bridge-like underwater relief, a relatively shallow band (on the order of several hundred metres) that contrasts with the deep trenches (over 1,000 m) flanking it on either side. This "underwater bridge" would link the two shores over several kilometres.
To this are added surface observations: the presence, on the Egyptian shore, of commemorative columns (including a granite column bearing an inscription attributed by some to Solomon), and on the Saudi shore, at Jebel al-Lawz, a set of remains (an altar, stone enclosures, a split rock) that some authors associate with the biblical Mount Sinai and the Israelite camp.
What science can and cannot say
One must be precise about the status of these elements. The bathymetry of the Gulf of Aqaba is a measurable fact: the bridge-like relief does exist and is documented by marine surveys. However, no scientific data allows us to assert that a wind or a natural phenomenon actually dried up this passage at a given date, nor that the Quranic crossing took place precisely there.
The Nuweiba hypothesis therefore remains a research lead, not a demonstration. It has the merit of proposing a location consistent with the details of the text (a narrow passage between two shores, a passable path, a lesser depth), but it rests on a chain of inferences in which every link is debatable.