1. What is geography?
The study of the physical features of the earth and its atmosphere, and of human activity as it affects and is affected by these, including the distribution of populations and resources, land use, and industries.
2. Five themes of geography
Location:
Absolute- As in coordinates of a map using longitude and latitude
Relative- General location, ex: next door, a short drive, next to the post office
Place: An area that is defined by everything in it. All places have features that give them personality and distinguish them from other places.
Region: An area that is defined by certain similar characteristics. Those unifying or similar characteristics can be physical, natural, human or cultural.
Movement: The way people, products, information and ideas move from one place to another.
Human-Environment Interaction:
Relationships between people and their environment; how people adapt to the environment and how they change it.
3. Branches of geography
Human geography: focus on the study of patterns and processes that shape human interaction with the environment, with particular reference to the causes and consequences of the spatial distribution of human activity on the Earth’s surface.
Physical geography: focuses on understanding the processes and patterns in the natural environment, as opposed to the built environment which is the domain of Human geography.
4. Lithosphere: The solid, outer part of the Earth. The Earth consists of three main layers: the core, or the inner layer; the mantle, in the middle; and the crust, which includes the continents and ocean floor. (100 kilometers, 60 miles). The lithosphere is always moving, but very slowly. It is broken into huge sections called tectonic plates. The extreme heat from the mantle part of the lithosphere makes it easier for the plates to move. The movement of the lithosphere, called plate tectonics, is the reason behind a lot of Earth’s most dramatic geologic events.
Asthenosphere: The highly viscous, mechanically weakly and ductilely deforming region of the upper mantle of the Earth. It lies below the lithosphere, at depths between 80 and 200 km below the surface. The asthenosphere is generally solid although some of its regions could be defined. The thickness of the asthenosphere depends mainly on the temperature. For some regions, asthenosphere could extend as deep as 700 km. A part of the upper mantle just below the lithosphere that is involved in plate tectonic movement and isostatic adjustment.
Layers inside the Earth: Crust, mantle, outer core and inner core.
5. Map projectionsmkl: A systematic transformation of the latitudes and longitudes of locations on the surface of a sphere or an ellipsoid into locations on a plane. Map projections are necessary for creating maps. All map projections distort the surface in some fashion. Depending on the purpose of the map, some distortions are acceptable and others are not; therefore different map projections exist in order to preserve some properties of the sphere-like body at the expense of other properties. There is no limit to the number of possible map projections.
6. Earth’s shape: Earth’s circumference and diameter differ because its shape is classified as an oblate sphered or ellipsoid, instead of a true sphere. Instead of being of equal circumference in all areas, the poles are squished, resulting in a bulge at the equator, and thus a larger circumference and diameter.
Earth’s rotation: The earth rotates about an imaginary line that passes through the North and South Poles of the planet. Earth rotates about this axis once each day.
7. Longitude: A geographic coordinate that specifies the east-west position of a point on the Earth’s surface.
Latitude: The angular distance of a place north or south of the earth’s equator, or of a celestial object north or south of the celestial equator, usually expressed in degrees and minutes. Latitude is an angle which ranges from 0 degree at the Equator to 90
