Articles in Physical Geography
Australia’s Climatic Anomalies
(Having just returned from a family trip to Australia, I feel compelled to muse over a few Australian topics over the next few days….).
In the various indices of the world’s “most livable cities,” those of Australia generally rank quite high. In the Economist Intelligence Unit‘s (EIU) most recent global liveability report, Melbourne places first, Adelaide fifth, Sydney seventh, and Perth …
The Role of Advection in Modeling Population Migrations
In the previous GeoCurrents post, we suggested that advection as well as diffusion should be taken into account in mathematical models of language expansion. Here, we examine one study of population movement that does just that. This study, co-authored by Kate Davison, Pavel Dolukhanov, Graeme R. Sarson, and Anvar Shukurov of University of Newcastle upon Tyne and published in Journal of Archaeological Science in 2006, aims to model the spread of Neolithic farmers in Europe from a localized area in the Near East. This work is particularly relevant to the linguistic issue at hand, as Bouckaert et al. argue that Indo-European languages were carried from Anatolia into Europe and elsewhere by those very Neolithic farmers.
Indo-Australian Plate Rent Asunder Beneath the Ocean
In April 2012, two massive earthquakes hit northern Sumatra. The earthquakes—one of magnitude 8.2 and the other 8.6—were far in excess of what one would expect to encounter many miles from a tectonic plate boundary. Indeed, “strike-slip earthquakes”, where pieces of crust rub against each other laterally, had been completely unknown in the area before the two quakes.
Extreme Salt Lakes Around the World
The world has many famous salt lakes. Central Asia’s Caspian and Aral Seas, alongside the Dead Sea between Jordan and Israel, are perhaps the best known. Utah’s Great Salt Lake and California’s Mono Lake and Salton Sea are also by no means obscure. These bodies of water are all fascinating in their own right, but by the standards of the …
Visualizing California’s Soggy Past
A previous GeoNote highlighted a collaborative effort to map historical changes in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin RiverDelta. In a similar spirit, the fantasy satellite map shown at left, created by Central Valley geographer Mark Clark and noted by Frank Jacobs, imagines what the entire state might have looked like in 1851. Perhaps the map’s most salient feature is massive Tulare Lake, …
The Siberian Curse: Whither Siberia?
Due to its possession of Siberia, Russia has the distinction of being both the world’s largest country by area and, by some measures, the coldest country. While Russia has for centuries been proud of its vast expanse and its frigid winters, some analysts both in Russia and abroad now see these two attributes as liabilities rather than assets. Whether Russia …
The Centrality of the Caucasus
For the past month, GeoCurrents has focused on the Caucasus, exploring the region’s history, languages, cuisines, and more. Two additional posts will conclude the series. We will subsequently pause to introduce some new features of the blog, and then we will move on to examine a different part of the world.
The current series began by asking a seemingly banal question, …
Sochi 2014: A Subtropical Winter Olympics?
In 2010, Foreign Policy magazine asked Russian opposition leader and Sochi native Boris Nemtsov why he opposed the 2014 Winter Olympics in his hometown. Nemtsov’s reply was broad ranging. He decried the displacement of 5,000 people while warning that corruption and organized crime would devour most of the construction funds showered on the city. He began his critique, however, with …
The Afghan “Graveyard of Empires” Myth and the Wakhan Corridor
The idea that Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires,” a country that perennially entices imperial conquerors only to humiliate and expel them, is often encountered. This potent cliché has been thoroughly debunked, yet it refuses to die. An October 7, 2011 Time magazine article, for example, opens with the provocative headline, “Afghanistan: Endgame in the Graveyard of Empires.” And as …
The Congo Pedicle and Its Challenges to Zambian Development
Namibia’s Caprivi Strip is not the only African panhandle to result from European imperial attempts to reach water-bodies. Cameroon, for example, has a northern protuberance that connects to the much-diminished Lake Chad. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s southern panhandle—officially the “Congo Pedicle”—falls in the same category. The agents of Belgium’s King Leopold II were
International Boundaries, Peace Parks, and Elephants in Southern Africa
Over the past century, a number of “international peace parks” have been established, designed both to demonstrate amity between neighboring countries and to facilitate the preservation of wildlife, habitat, and natural beauty. The first such “transboundary protected area,” as peace parks are more prosaically labeled, was inaugurated by Sweden and Norway in 1914, an inauspicious
Lozi (Barotse) Nationalism in Western Zambia
The deeper roots of dissatisfaction in Namibia’s Caprivi Strip (discussed in the previous post) extend to the colonial dissolution of the Lozi Kingdom of Barotseland. Centered in what is now western Zambia, Barotseland was one of the strongest indigenous polities of southern central Africa, controlling a broad swath of territory that encompassed the Caprivi Strip
The Toshka Scheme: Egypt’s Salvation or Mubarak’s Folly?
Dictatorial rulers often favor grandiose construction projects, on which they not uncommonly bestow their own names. Egypt has been no exception. The world’s largest water-moving facility is the Mubarak Pumping Station, located on an island in Lake Nasser. When such rulers fall from power, their names are often stripped away from such monuments. It will
The Misleading Ecological Footprint Model
The Happy Earth Index, discussed yesterday, relies on the ecological footprint to measure environmental sustainability. The footprint, widely regarded as “the world’s premier measure of humanity’s demand on nature,” is defined as “the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render
Beyond Economic Development: The So-Called Happy Planet Index
Most measurements of development rely heavily on per capita economic output. While the U.N.’s Human Development Index (HDI) considers education and longevity as well, Gross National Income remains an essential component. The use of such economic data as a proxy for overall development is controversial. Some find it unduly materialistic, focusing on the raw production
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Diversity Amid Globalization: World Regions, Environment, Development (5th Edition)
Globalization and Diversity: Geography of a Changing World (3rd Edition)
