Geography Master Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Geography Master - Essay Example It had been branching out for a long time, more so, with the new discoveries. History of physical geography starts with the cartography of early Greeks, developed by Eratosthenes, Strabo and Aristotle, and later popularised by Ptolemy, who even thought of latitude and longitude. The voyages of the discoverers and adventurers, conquests of Alexander the Great, geographical exploration and the broadening of the scientific outlook in humans, contributed immensely to the development of physical geography. Physical/Environmental geography includes hydrosphere, Lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. Physical geography is considered to be a branch of two disciplines, Geography and Earth Sciences. . "The main purpose of Physical Geography is to explain the spatial characteristics of the various natural phenomena that exist in Earth's hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and lithosphere," http://www.physicalgeography.net/home.html Study of Physical geography consists of rocks, minerals, land formations, animals, water, plants, environment, water bodies, oceans, atmosphere, rivers, weather and climate etc. It also covers Meteorology, Climatology, Biogeography, Geomorphology, Pedology, and Hydrology and every natural aspect, shape on the outer skin of Earth. It also consists of a history of uniformitarianism, Charles Darwin's Evolution, constant exploration and survey, and the recently popularised conservation. It explains the quantitative revolution with statistics and measurement and determines man's relationship with the land. It deals with global warming and greenhouse effect. It explains the environment as it is found on Earth today, points out the natural and human-made changes and assimilates efforts of restoration. There are many future scopes of physical geography research. Applied physical geography is used for solving human-induced environmental problems. It has solutions for many daunting riddles, posed by an ecologically imbalanced world. It also can be used for new techniques like Remote Sensing to monitor the resources of the earth and atmosphere. Cartography combined with the modern scientific methods, could be a formidable force. These are the fundamentals of physical geography: It is concerned with the atmospheric composition and the layered atmosphere, consisting of troposphere, tropopause, stratosphere, influence by the polar jet stream and the subtropical jet stream, isothermal layer, ozone layer, mesosphere, stratopause and mesopause, and thermosphere. It learns the physical behaviour of the atmosphere and gas laws, temperature, density, pressure, volume, proportional atmosphere, proportional and inversely proportional volumes. It studies mass, gravity, force of acceleration, terminal velocity, ultra violet radiation, atmospheric effects on incoming radiation, absorption, patterns of solar radiation absorption, greenhouse effect and photosynthesis, short and long wave radiations, global heat balance, meridional transport, sensible, latent and surface heat flux, ocean currents, the concept of temperature, daily and annual cycles of temperature, global surface temperature distribution, forces acting to cre ate wind, local and regional wind systems, global scale circulation of the atmosphere, upper air winds and the jet streams, air masses and frontal transitional zones, the mid-latitude cyclone, thunderstorms and