Geography as a Discipline: Branches, Approaches and Physical Geography

What Geography Studies

Origins and Definitions

• The term “geography” was coined by Eratosthenes, a Greek scholar who lived from 276 to 194 BC.
• The word combines geo, meaning earth, and graphos, meaning description. Together they mean “description of the earth.”
• Geographer Richard Hartshorne defined geography as concerned with the description and explanation of the “areal differentiation” of the earth’s surface.
• Geographer Hettner defined it as the study of differences in phenomena usually related in different parts of the earth’s surface.

The Three Questions Geography Asks

• What? The first question identifies patterns of natural and cultural features found on the earth’s surface.
• Where? The second question locates the distribution of natural and human features across the earth’s surface.
• Why? The third question explains causal relationships between features and processes. This is what made geography a scientific discipline, not just an inventory.

Two Approaches: Systematic and Regional

• German geographer Alexander Von Humboldt (1769-1859) introduced the systematic approach, which studies one phenomenon worldwide before identifying its typologies.
• Humboldt’s contemporary, German geographer Karl Ritter (1779-1859), developed the regional approach, which divides the world into regions and studies all phenomena within each region.
• Under the systematic approach, natural vegetation is studied globally first, then typologies like equatorial rain forests or monsoon forests are identified.

Branches, Techniques and Geography in History

Branches of Physical and Human Geography

• Geomorphology, covered in full in our dedicated article, studies landforms, their evolution, and the processes that shape them.
• Climatology covers the structure of the atmosphere, weather elements, and climatic types and regions, the same scheme covered in our Koeppen’s Scheme article.
• Hydrology studies water across the earth’s surface, including oceans, lakes and rivers, and its effect on life.
• Soil Geography, also called pedology, studies soil formation, soil types, fertility, distribution and use.
• On the human side, Social/Cultural Geography studies society’s spatial dynamics. Population and Settlement Geography studies growth, distribution and migration. Economic Geography covers agriculture, industry and trade. Political Geography studies boundaries and political behaviour. Historical Geography studies how a region’s space gets organised over time.

Biogeography and the Methods Both Sides Share

• Biogeography emerged from the interface between physical and human geography. It includes Plant Geography, Zoo Geography, Ecology and Environmental Geography.
• A biome, a central concept in biogeography, is a large ecological community of plants and animals adapted to a specific climate, repeating across continents wherever that climate repeats.
• Environmental Geography grew out of worldwide concern over land degradation, pollution and conservation.
• Every approach shares a philosophy strand too: Geographical Thought and Human Ecology, or land-human interaction.
• Both sides share methods: Cartography, the science of mapmaking; Quantitative and Statistical Techniques; Field Survey Methods; and Geo-informatics, covering Remote Sensing, GIS and GPS.

Time as Geography’s Fourth Dimension

• Geography treats time as an integral fourth dimension, alongside the three spatial ones. A distance of 1,500 km can also be described as two hours away by plane or seventeen hours by fast train, converting space into time.
• The Himalayas acted as a great barrier protecting India, but their passes also gave routes to migrants and invaders from Central Asia.
• India’s sea coast encouraged contact with people from East and Southeast Asia, Europe and Africa.
• Physical Geography’s four realms are the Lithosphere (landforms, drainage, relief), Atmosphere (weather and climate), Hydrosphere (oceans, seas, lakes) and Biosphere (all life). A fifth process, Pedogenesis, shapes the soils across all of them, depending on parent rock, climate, biological activity and time, together known as the soil-forming factors.