1. Introducing Physical Geography

Photo 2: King's University history trip to Eastern-Europe. Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. 2011-06-06

Eratosthenes

The Greeks were the first to organise the world around them into two fields of study: cosmography (study of skies, stars, etc.) and geography (study of the terrestrial world). It was a student of Aristotle, Eratosthenes (c. 275-195 BCE), who is considered the first geographer and coined the term geography. Geo means Earth and graphia means description: geography is the description of the Earth. Eratosthenes is very famous for his remarkably accurate calculation of the circumference of the earth (geodesy), as well as for his concepts on the Earth’s environmental zones (hot equator, cold poles, and temperate zones in between). This was remarkably advanced for that time when some still believed the earth was flat.

Alexander von Humboldt

Physical geography is a major subfield of geography. During the age of exploration (1500s), the discovery of the new world started more or less with Columbus and continued for a few centuries. Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) introduced the scientific milestone: The Scientific Method, which defines (scientific) truth by the testing of hypotheses. Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) was one of the greatest scholars of these times. He traveled 3000 km on the previously uncharted Orinoco River in northern South-America, as well as to Ecuador, Peru, Mexico, Cuba, and the United States. Later he also traveled to Russia and remote areas of Siberia. He is famous for his six-volume book series named Cosmos, a collection of his observations regarding soils, vegetation, animals, oceans, and atmosphere. This was a very important scientific achievement of the nineteenth century. My recent travels took me to Berlin, where I biked past the Humboldt University (Photo 1), named after the German brothers Alexander von Humboldt the geographer and Wilhelm von Humboldt the philosopher and politician.

Charles Darwin

Another explorer of Humboldt’s time was Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who had studied natural history, and traveled at the age of 22 to the South American coastline for five years on the H.M.S. Beagle. At age 28, he concluded that species change gradually, what he called “transmutation.” Twenty-two years later he published his famous scientific milestone On the Origin of Species. The image below (Photo 2) displays replicas of some of Darwin’s research instruments.

Photo 3: Darwin's research instruments at the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Drumheller, Alberta. 2011-05-12