I was recently surprised to learn the extent to which the United States dominates the list of world’s largest corporation by market capitalization. As the chart posted below shows, the seven most valuable companies are headquartered in the U.S., as…

(Note: This is the final post in a long series on basic physical geography, which was originally designed to help educators teach the subject. As the series progressed, however, posts have strayed outside the pedagogical realm. I do hope to…

In searching the internet for climate maps that might be useful for educational purposes, I have continued to be disappointed and occasionally dumbfounded. Many highly ranked maps provide outright misinformation. Consider, for example, the two maps posted below, both of…

The previous GeoCurrents post harshly criticized several climate maps for extending the subtropical zones too far toward the poles. But after doing a little casual research, I was chagrined to discover that these maps largely fit the formal, or “geographical,”…

As noted in the previous post, many educational climate maps that rank high in internet image searches are based on a simplistic climatic model that is too focused on latitude. In this post, I scrutinize and criticize four such maps.…

As earlier GeoCurrents posts in the current series on educational geography have noted, sun angles, which are determined by latitude, play a huge role in shaping the geography of climate. Simply put, the lower the latitude of any given location,…

As the previous GeoCurrents post noted, longitude is to a significant extent a matter of time. Historically, every town kept its own time based on its longitude. Wherever you found yourself, “noon” was the moment when the sun reached its…

As was noted in an earlier post, most maps made in the 1500s and 1600s were relatively accurate in the north/south direction but often strikingly inaccurate in the east/west direction. This discrepancy was because latitude was relatively easy to determine…

I had decided to move on from exploring the priority of north & south over east & west, but I realized that the most prominent example in the United States had escaped my attention: the northeast coast. Although this coast…

Learning the cardinal directions is an important but often neglected aspect of early geographical education. It is my impression that the understanding of cardinal directions, like most other aspects of geography, is in sharp decline. There are several reasons for…

People vary greatly in their ability to orient themselves by the cardinal direction. But even those with a good sense of direction tend to get confused in certain places. In my experience, Stanford University is a particularly bad place for…

As recent GeoCurrents posts have argued, latitude is distinctive from longitude, just as the  north/south direction is distinctive from the east/west direction. To put it simply, longitude, like east and west, is relative, whereas latitude, like north and south, is…

The cardinal directions seem to be equivalent concepts and certainly appear that way on maps and globes. Everywhere on Earth, one might assume, the north/south axis is perpendicular the east/west axis, with the four lines that indicate the cardinal directions…

At first glance, latitude and longitude seem like equivalent concepts. On any local-scale map, lines of latitude (parallels) and longitude (meridians) form a grid, with the two sets of lines intersecting at 90° angles. On such maps, lines of longitude…

Latitude, as we have seen, is closely connected to midday sun angles. Because of this relationship, latitude has long been relatively simply to measure. Four hundred years ago, navigators could easily determine how far they were to the north or…

(This post is part of a long GeoCurrents series aimed at helping parents and teachers instruct students in basic geography. The material at the end of this post is most appropriate for students at the middle- and high-school levels.) Now…

(This is the tenth post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children, aimed those who live in Bozeman, Montana. It is, however, misplaced in the sequence, as it should come after the post on the rotation of…

As the previous post explained, seasonal temperature changes are mostly caused by changes in the midday sun angle. By why does the height of the sun above the horizon vary at different times of the year? The key factor here…

(This is the eighth post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) Now that we have gone through the preliminary materials on basic global geography, it is time to take up a much larger issue: seasons and…

(This is the seventh post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) As was noted in the previous post, hemispheres are created by conceptually slicing a globe through its center. The dividing line between the two hemispheres…

(This is the sixth post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children. It is, however, misplaced in the sequence, as it should come immediately after the post on the rotation of the Earth. Once all the posts…

(This is the fifth post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) After having covered the Earth’s daily rotation, it is time to consider the tilt of its axis. Here a little basic geometry is necessary, focused…

(This is the fourth post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) One of the first geography lessons for young students should involve spinning a globe to show the Earth’s daily rotation around its axis. For younger…

Early geography lessons should try to break some misleading habits of thought about the world and its orientation. Principal among these is the idea that north is “up” and south is “down,” and that as a result the North Pole…

(This is the second post in a series aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) As students gain familiarity with a globe, they need to grasp the size of the planet that it represents. It is a simple matter to…

(This is the first of a series of posts aimed at helping parents home-school their children.) Although I love maps and use them extensively when teaching geography, I firmly believe that elementary instruction should begin with a globe. Throughout the…

As regular readers probably noticed, GeoCurrents abruptly ceased posting at the end of July, 2025, just after having promised a new series on the Druze. Family considerations figured prominently in this cessation. A few months earlier, my son and daughter-in-law…

Armed conflict over the past few weeks in southern Syria between the Druze and Bedouin militias receiving help from the Syrian military have taken over a thousand lives. As reported in the Kurdish press, Tawfiq al-Hijri, Deputy Head of the…

The gray wolf is usually seen as a wilderness species, an animal that needs vast expanses of habitat far from human concentrations, as well as sizable populations of large herbivores to prey upon. Yet many distribution maps, including one featured…

One of the most surprising aspects of the recovery of the gray wolf in the United States is the return of the species to California. Wolves had been eliminated from the state in the 1920s and were not expected to…

As discussed in the previous post, the gray wolf has made a remarkable but controversial recovery in Europe. The same is true in the United States. In the mid twentieth century, wolves were found only in Alaska, far northeastern Minnesota,…

As I was preparing to resume posting on GeoCurrents after a short hiatus, I decided to examine recent posts on the fascinating but unfortunately named Reddit site called “MapPorn.” As always, I was struck by many contributions, but what really…

The second half of my lecture on continents has been posted on YouTube and can be found here. It begins with the geological conception of the terms “continent” and “continental,” and then pivots to show why the continental scheme is…