Colombia’s Three Great Cordilleras As I wind down the current series on the 2026 Colombian election, a brief post on elevation and the election results seems in order. Colombia has major elevation differences, with relatively densely…

As discussed in recent GeoCurrents posts, the northern and central parts of Colombia’s Andes region – the core area of the country – voted heavily for the narrowly victorious rightwing candidate, Abelardo do le Espriella, in the 2026 election. Several…

The electoral geography of Colombia follows a modified “core/periphery” pattern, one in which the central region of the country tends to vote for rightwing candidates while the outer areas tend to favor leftwing candidates. As the previous GeoCurrents post showed,…

A recent GeoCurrents post suggested that race played a significant role in the 2026 Colombian presidential election. The racial factor is easily seen in the voting patterns of Black Colombians, of Afro-Colombians, who number between five and seven million, constituting…

The previous GeoCurrents post on the 2026 Colombian election argued that Colombia, like most Latin American countries, does not have the stark urban/rural electoral divide that now characterizes the United States. The post showed that in Colombia’s conservative central region,…

A recent GeoCurrents post suggested that the electoral geography of the United States has strikingly deviated from that of Latin America during the 21st century. In the U.S., population density has become one of the main influences on voting patterns,…

As noted in the two previous GeoCurrents posts, it is challenging to make a map of climate favorability partly because preferences vary significantly from person to person. This problem is largely avoided on the ingenious website myPerfectWeather, which allows visitors…

One reason why I like the “Camelot Climate Index Map” (discussed in the previous GeoCurrents post) is the fact that that it is explicitly framed as a climate map rather than a weather map. Most of its competitors claim to…

My X (Twitter) feed has recently featured a number of maps that delineate and rank climate zones in the United States based on how comfortable or idyllic they supposedly are. I find these maps interesting but inevitably problematic. One of…

The three northwestern coastal departments of Peru, Tumbes, Piura, and Lambayeque all voted solidly for the victorious rightwing candidate, Keiko Fujimori, in the 2026 election, giving her, respectively, 64.4%, 57%, and 58.9% of their votes. By Peruvian standards, these three…

This penultimate post on the 2026 Peruvian presidential election examines the relationship between the electoral results and socio-economic development at the departmental level. Not surprisingly, the rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimori generally supported the interests of the business community and the…

Comparing an elevation map of Peru with a map of its 2026 presidential election shows that most highland area voted for the defeated leftwing candidate Roberto Sánchez. Tension between the people of the Andean plateaus and those of the economically…

Not surprisingly, language and ethnicity were major factors in the 2026 Peruvian presidential election. As can be seen in the maps posted below, the defeated leftwing candidate Roberto Sánchez had his best results in areas where Spanish is not the…

The second and final round of Peru’s 2026 presidential election was razor close, with the victorious rightwing candidate Keiko Fujimori receiving 50.11 percent of the vote and the defeated leftwing candidate Roberto Sánchez receiving 49.89 percent. Not surprisingly, election maps…

Dividing the terrestrial world into the “Global North” and the “Global South” is becoming increasingly common. Simple versions of this “two worlds” model have a relatively clean north/south division, with only Australia and New Zealand falling out of place as…

The past several GeoCurrents posts have examined the geography of the world’s wealthiest people by mapping their primary residences. As these posts showed, those with fortunes greater than $20 billion are primarily concentrated in the United States, west-central Europe, and…

When I turned to AI to answer the question in the title to this post, ChatGPT replied “Monaco,” as did Grok, while Gemini (Google) came back with “San Francisco.” Gemini, however, specified that it had surveyed only “major” cities. When…

The previous GeoCurrents post showed that most of the world’s wealthiest persons live in just a few areas, with primary concentrations in the United States, west-central Europe, and maritime East Asia, and secondary concentrations in Moscow, Dubai, and “Greater Mumbai”…

The United States is well known for its concentration of wealth at the upper end of the spectrum. A household in the United States must have a net worth of roughly 13 to 14 million US dollars to be in…

Since the fall of Syria’s Assad Regime in December 2024, I have been wondering what would become of the Druze people and the areas in which they are the majority population. Particularly important is the Jabal al-Druze, or “Mountain of…

(Note: Last December I began work on a series of posts focusing on the geography of wealth and corporate power. After a single post on the location of corporate headquarters, I had to suspend my work on this topic. This…

The desiccation of the Aral Sea is a widely reported and well-known environmental disaster. Before the late twentieth century, this so-called sea was vast lake that supported major fisheries. Over the past seventy years, most of the flow of the…

As explained in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khwarazm, located south of the (former) Aral Sea in Central Asia, was a major intellectual hub in late-ancient and medieval times, producing two of the world’s greatest scholars, al-Biruni…

The previous GeoCurrents post featured a map of the birthplaces of ten prominent medieval scholars from greater Khorasan. As was noted, two of these thinkers, al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī, were from Khwarazm in what is now northern Uzbekistan – as is…

The modern region of Khorasan covers three provinces in northeastern Iran: North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan. Razavi Khorasan, the name of which refers to Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, is by far the most…

The most recent GeoCurrents posts expressed skepticism of the idea that the Persian, of Farsi-speaking, regions of Iran are more economically developed than the non-Persian regions. As I showed, several non-Persian regions have relatively high per capita income and production.…

The previous post argued that the “Persian” (or Farsi-speaking) provinces of Iran are not necessarily more prosperous and economically developed than the “non-Persian” provinces, focusing on the relatively affluent but non-Farsi-speaking Caspian region, particularly Mazandaran province. The Azeri-speaking (or Azerbaijani-speaking)…

The previous GeoCurrents post showed that the location of oil and natural gas deposits provides a partial explanation of the differences in the distribution of wealth and economic productivity across the country. But other factors must also be considered. Could…

Not surprisingly, the distribution of oil and natural gas provides one of the main explanations of Iran’s spatial pattern of economic productivity. As noted in the previous post, the coastal provinces of southwestern Iran post some of the highest production…

(Note: GeoCurrents has been on an extended hiatus due to personal issues and teaching obligations. I now hope to resume regular posting. My initial focus will be on Iran, for obvious reasons). Iran is usually regarded as a middle-income country.…

I was recently surprised to learn the extent to which the United States dominates the list of world’s largest corporation by market capitalization. As the chart posted below shows, the seven most valuable companies are headquartered in the U.S., as…

(Note: This is the final post in a long series on basic physical geography, which was originally designed to help educators teach the subject. As the series progressed, however, posts have strayed outside the pedagogical realm. I do hope to…

In searching the internet for climate maps that might be useful for educational purposes, I have continued to be disappointed and occasionally dumbfounded. Many highly ranked maps provide outright misinformation. Consider, for example, the two maps posted below, both of…