Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
One of the basic problems many people have with geography is that they just don't understand it. They
don't speak the language.
Peninsulas and capes. Harbors and bays. Arroyos and aquifers. Estuaries and deltas. We were supposed
to learn what all of these things meant back in elementary school. But somewhere along the line our tundras
got mixed up with our savannas.
Beginning with this chapter, some of geography's more confusing terms will be introduced, along with
an overview of the earth's basic physical features and how they came to be. Starting with the most basic
feature of them all.
How Old Is the Earth, and How Was It Formed?
Aristotle was pretty smart, but he didn't know it all. One of his mistakes was the notion that the world had
always existed. But he shouldn't feel bad; he wasn't alone. Plenty of other people have just assumed that
the earth always was.
Yet almost every culture has produced creation myths to explain the beginning of the world. And until
very recently in human history, faith outweighed science in reaching those explanations. Perhaps the most
notorious attempt to reconcile the biblical version of creation with known facts was the timetable worked
out by Archbishop James Ussher in 1650. In Ussher's chronology of the world, creation took place at 9
A.M.
on October 26, 4004
BC.
Included in the margins of the King James Version of the Bible for centuries
to come, Ussher's version of events was accepted as gospel, literally. Even in modern America, the fight-
ing isn't over. During the 1980s, in several American states, groups of fundamentalist Christians went to
the courts in an attempt to require state schools to teach “creationist theory”—a pseudoscience grounded
in the biblical version of creation—alongside Darwin's evolutionary theory, in biology textbooks. The cre-
ationists even had a powerful ally in President Reagan, whose scientific views must be taken into account.
After all, this is the man who once said on the campaign trail that trees were a major cause of pollution!
(His press secretary, James Brady, amused reporters by shouting “Killer trees!” as the president's plane
flew over a forest.)
Of course, religion held sway for most of history. Science entered the picture very slowly but quickly
gathered steam. In 1779, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, made the remark-
ably astute guess that the earth started out hot and was slowly cooling. Believing that the earth was made
primarily of iron, he heated iron balls and then measured the rate at which they cooled to come up with an
