Salient features of world’s physical geography: Introduction
Geography is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of the Earth and planets. Geography is an all-encompassing discipline that seeks an understanding of Earth and its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but also how they have changed and come to be.
Geography as a discipline can be split broadly into two main subsidiary fields:
- Physical geography: Physical geography focuses on geography as an Earth science. It is the study of planet and its systems. It is concerned with all activities found in its four spheres, that is, lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere.
- Physical geography can be divided into many broad categories like
- Astronomical Geography : It studies the celestial phenomena which concern the Earth’s surface particularly Sun, Moon and Planets of the Solar System.
- Geomorphology
- Geomorphology is the study of landforms and landform evolution. The topic traditionally has been studied both qualitatively, which is the description of landforms, and quantitatively, which is process-based and describes forces acting on Earth’s surface to produce landforms and landform change.
- Tectonics are the processes that control the structure and properties of the Earth’s crust and its evolution through time.
- The scientific study of landforms is the subject matter of geomorphology which is a part of physical geography.
- Climatology: It is the study of the structure of atmosphere, atmospheric conditions and related climatic and weather phenomena. It includes the study of atmospheric composition, climatic regions seasons, etc.
- Oceanography: It is concerned with the study of various types of Oceanic formate component and processes related to ocean floor depths, currents, corals reefs, and continental drifts etc.
- Soil Geography : It is devoted to study the processes of soil formation, soil types, their fertility status, distribution and use.
- Biogeography: The study of the geographic patterns of species distribution.
- Human geography (Anthropogeography): Human geography is concerned with the study of people and their communities, cultures, economies, and interactions with the environment by studying their relations with and across space and place.
- Anthropogeography : It largely deals with racial phenomena in their spatial context.
- Cultural geography : It focusses on the origin, components and impact of human culturs, both material and non-material.
- Economic geography : It refers to the study of the location and distribution of economic activities at the local, regional, national and world scale. Economic geography can be studied under the following heads : Resource geography. Agricultural geography, Industrial and transport geography.
- Political geography : It is the study of political phenomena in their spatial context. Main focus remains for creation and transformation of political and administrative region.
- Historical geography : Spatial and temporal trends of geographical phenomena are studied in Historical geography.
- Social geography : It is the analysis of social phenomena in space. Poverty, health, education, livelihood are some important fields of study in social geography.
- Population geography : It is the study of various dimensions of population like its population distribution density, composition, ferrility, mortality, migration etc.
- Settlement geography : It is the study of Rural/Urban settlements, their size, distribution, functions, heirach, and off various other parameters of settlement system.
