Geography Blog

Start here

Start here: a beginner's path through geography

Geography gets easier once a few core ideas click: where things are, how maps flatten a round planet, and what shapes the land and the climate. This page puts the posts in a sensible order.

0.0° 0.0°Where the equator meets the prime meridian

Five ideas to learn first

  1. Location. Every place has an address on a global grid of latitude and longitude. Once you can read it, you can find anywhere on any map or app.
  2. Maps flatten a sphere. A globe is the only map without distortion. Every flat map stretches something, and knowing what it stretches stops you misjudging sizes and distances.
  3. Elevation. Contour lines turn a flat sheet into a 3D landscape. Reading them lets you see hills, valleys and steep ground before you get there.
  4. Time follows the sun. Earth turns about 15 degrees an hour, so clocks are set by zones. Politics then bends those zones into odd shapes.
  5. Land and climate are built by forces. Plate movement raises mountains, water and ice carve them down, and latitude, oceans and altitude set the climate.

Suggested reading order

The posts build on each other in this order. Each takes 5 to 10 minutes.

51.5°N 0.0°

Greenwich, London

Latitude and longitude, explained

How the grid of parallels and meridians pins down any spot on Earth, and how to read and convert coordinates.

64.2°N 51.7°W

Nuuk, Greenland

Map projections: why every flat map distorts

Mercator, equal-area and compromise maps, what each one stretches, and how to pick the right one.

54.5°N 3.2°W

Scafell Pike, England

Map reading basics: scale, legend and compass

Scale, grid references, the three norths and orienting a paper map with a compass.

46.9°N 121.8°W

Mount Rainier, Washington

How to read contour lines on a topographic map

Contour intervals, index contours and the shapes that mark ridges, valleys, saddles and cliffs.

27.7°N 85.3°E

Kathmandu, Nepal

How time zones work, from UTC to the date line

Why the world uses about 15 degrees per hour, where the odd half-hour offsets are, and how to convert times.

3.1°S 60.0°W

Manaus, Brazil

Climate zones and the Köppen system

The five main Köppen groups, what the letter codes mean, and the forces that set a place's climate.

36.1°N 112.1°W

Grand Canyon, Arizona

Landforms explained: how Earth's surface takes shape

Mountains, plateaus, plains, canyons, dunes and coasts, and the forces that build and wear them down.

30.0°N 31.2°E

Cairo, on the Nile

How rivers work: from source to delta

Drainage basins, meanders, floodplains and deltas, plus why river lengths are so hard to pin down.

28.0°N 86.9°E

Mount Everest

How mountain ranges form

Fold, fault-block and volcanic mountains, what tectonic plates have to do with them, and how mountains shape weather.

Tips for students

  • Keep a globe or an atlas nearby. Look up every place a post mentions; the coordinates on each card make that quick.
  • Compare the same region on two different world maps. Seeing Greenland shrink between projections teaches more than any definition.
  • Sketch. A rough map from memory, with the equator, tropics and a few rivers, shows you what you know and what you don't.
  • Learn the vocabulary in pairs: weather and climate, latitude and longitude, source and mouth, true north and magnetic north.
  • Use a terrain view in a free online map to check what contour lines on a paper map are telling you.

Tips for travelers

  • Check the time difference in UTC terms, and check whether either place is on daylight saving time on your dates. See time zones.
  • Check the climate type and the season. South of the equator, seasons are reversed, and in the tropics the wet and dry seasons matter more than temperature. See climate zones.
  • Check the elevation. Air cools with height, and many people feel altitude effects above about 2,500 m (8,000 ft). Mountain towns can be far colder than the lowlands nearby.
  • Carry a paper map for hiking, and learn the map reading basics before you need them. Phones run out of battery and signal.

A short glossary

Equator
The line of 0° latitude, halfway between the poles.
Prime meridian
The line of 0° longitude, through Greenwich in London.
Projection
A method of drawing the curved Earth on a flat surface.
Contour line
A line on a map joining points of equal elevation.
Scale
The ratio between a distance on the map and the same distance on the ground.
UTC
Coordinated Universal Time, the reference that time zones are measured from.
Drainage basin
All the land that drains into one river and its tributaries.
Plate tectonics
The theory that Earth's outer shell is split into moving plates.

Start-here questions

What should I read first?

Start with latitude and longitude. Coordinates come up in almost every other post, and they take only a few minutes to learn.

Is physical geography the same as earth science?

They overlap a lot. Earth science leans toward geology, oceans and the atmosphere as systems, while physical geography is more interested in where features are, how they are distributed and how they appear on maps.

How do I remember which way latitude runs?

Lines of latitude run east to west like the rungs of a ladder, and the numbers tell you how far up or down the ladder (north or south) you are. Longitude lines run from pole to pole.