PT23 · S2 · Q22 Shortly after the Persian Gulf

One red flag here is that we never talked about "desert regions" and so in order to make this answer relevant you'd have to know that the Persian Gulf involves a 'desert region'. LSAT never tests outside knowledge like that. You don't need to know geography or history of wars to answer these questions. This answer might seem a little appealing because if temperate regions like the Baltic Sea tend to have bad looking oil metrics, then it wouldn't be surprising if post-war Persian Gulf looked comparable to the Baltic Sea areas. But we were only told that PAHs were comparable, and we were told those were "relatively low" (compared to average PAHs for an oil producing region, presumably). So this answer does not seem to be useful.

Again, it's extremely unlikely that the correct answer would require that students know that the Persian Gulf war took place in a desert region. But this goes in the opposite direction of what we'd like. Since we're trying to explain why the oil contamination and PAH metrics don't look as bad as we would have expected them to look for the postwar Persian Gulf, it would help us to say, "Sure stuff was bad during the war, but the bad stuff dissipates quickly thereafter." This instead, is suggesting that the bad stuff dissipates more slowly in desert regions like the Persian Gulf.

Again, it's extremely unlikely that the correct answer would require that students know that the Persian Gulf war took place in a desert region. This does go in the direction we'd like, compared to (B). Since we're trying to explain why the oil contamination and PAH metrics don't look as bad as we would have expected them to look for the postwar Persian Gulf, it would help us to say, "Sure stuff was bad during the war, but the bad stuff dissipates quickly thereafter." The problem is that this is a comparison between temperate and desert; it's not saying that bad stuff dissipates quickly in the desert, just that it dissipates more quickly than it would in a temperate region. However, the crux of our paradox isn't that we need to explain a difference between the Persian Gulf and Baltic Sea areas. The paradox is mainly, "Given all the bad oil stuff that happened during the war, how come postwar Persian Gulf has less oil contamination than prewar Persian Gulf?" This answer does nothing to address that because prewar Persian Gulf and postwar Persian Gulf are both desert regions. If oil contaminants dissipated really quickly, that could explain why postwar looks comparable to prewar. But this answer has no power to explain why postwar looks better (less oil contamination) than prewar.

Whether the war ended earlier than expected or before the damage could be as bad as people feared, that doesn't change the fact that there were hundreds of smoky oil fires and deliberate oil spills. So we still need to explain how a survey we took right after all that stuff happened could somehow look better than a prewar survey. Even if this answer said, "It turns out that the fires and spills during the war did no damage", then you would still expect a postwar survey to be comparable to a prewar one, not show less contamination.