Outline of geography

Geography – study of earth and its people.[1]

The physical world.

The human world.

Nature of geography[edit]
Geography is[edit]

 an academic discipline – a body of knowledge given to − or received by − a disciple (student); a branch or

sphere of knowledge, or field of study, that an individual has chosen to specialize in. Modern geography is
an all-encompassing discipline that seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural
complexities − not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has
been called 'the world discipline'.[2]
 a field of science – widely recognized category of specialized expertise within science, and typically
embodies its own terminology and nomenclature. Such a field will usually be represented by one or more
scientific journals, where peer reviewed research is published. There are many geography-related scientific
journals.
 a natural science – field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of natural environment
(physical geography).
 a social science – field of academic scholarship that explores aspects of human society (human
geography).
 an interdisciplinary field – a field that crosses traditional boundaries between academic disciplines or
schools of thought, as new needs and professions have emerged. Many of the branches of physical
geography are also branches of Earth science.

Branches of geography[edit]
As "the bridge between the human and physical sciences," geography is divided into two main branches:

 human geography
 physical geography[3][4][5]
Other branches include:

 integrated geography
 geomatics
 regional geography
All the branches are further described below...
Physical geography[edit]

 Physical geography – examines the natural environment and how the climate, vegetation & life, soil, water,
and landforms are produced and interact.[6]
Fields of physical geography[edit]

 Geomorphology – study of landforms and the processes that them, and more broadly, of the processes
controlling the topography of any planet. Seeks to understand why landscapes look the way they do, to
understand landform history and dynamics, and to predict future changes through a combination of field
observation, physical experiment, and numerical modeling.
 Hydrology – study of the movement, distribution, and quality of water throughout the Earth, including the
hydrologic cycle, water resources and environmental watershed sustainability.
 Glaciology – study of glaciers, or more generally ice and natural phenomena that involve ice.
 Oceanography – studies a wide range of topics pertaining to oceans, including marine organisms and
ecosystem dynamics; ocean currents, waves, and geophysical fluid dynamics; plate tectonics and the
geology of the sea floor; and fluxes of various chemical substances and physical properties within the
ocean and across its boundaries.
 Biogeography – study of the distribution of species spatially and temporally. Over
areal ecological changes, it is also tied to the concepts of species and their past, or present living
'refugium', their survival locales, or their interim living sites. It aims to reveal where organisms live, and at
what abundance.[7]
 Climatology – study of climate, scientifically defined as weather conditions averaged over a period
of time.[8]
 Meteorology is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes
and short term forecasting (in contrast with climatology).
 Pedology – study of soils in their natural environment[9] that deals with pedogenesis, soil morphology,
and soil classification.
 Palaeogeography – study of what the geography was in times past, most often concerning the physical
landscape, but also the human or cultural environment.
 Coastal geography – study of the dynamic interface between the ocean and the land, incorporating both
the physical geography (i.e. coastal geomorphology, geology and oceanography) and the human
geography (sociology and history) of the coast. It involves an understanding of coastal weathering
processes, particularly wave action, sediment movement and weather, and also the ways in which humans
interact with the coast.
 Quaternary science – focuses on the Quaternary period, which encompasses the last 2.6 million years,
including the last ice age and the Holocene period.
 Landscape ecology – the relationship between spatial patterns of urban development and ecological
processes on a multitude of landscape scales and organizational levels.[10][11][12]
Approaches of physical geography[edit]

 Quantitative geography – Quantitative research tools and methods applied to geography. See also
the quantitative revolution.
 Systems approach –
Human geography[edit]

 Human geography – one of the two main subfields of geography, it is the study of human use and
understanding of the world and the processes which have affected it. Human geography broadly differs
 from physical geography in that it focuses on the built environment and how space is created, viewed, and
managed by humans as well as the influence humans have on the space they occupy.[6]
Fields of human geography[edit]

 Cultural geography – study of cultural products and norms and their variations across and relations to
spaces and places. It focuses on describing and analyzing the ways language, religion, economy,
government and other cultural phenomena vary or remain constant, from one place to another and on
explaining how humans function spatially.[13]
 Children's geographies – study of places and spaces of children's lives, characterized experientially,
politically and ethically. Children's geographies rests on the idea that children as a social group share
certain characteristics which are experientially, politically and ethically significant and which are worthy
of study. The pluralisation in the title is intended to imply that children's lives will be markedly different
in differing times and places and in differing circumstances such as gender, family, and class. The
range of focii within children's geographies include:
 Children and the city
 Children and the countryside
 Children and technology
 Children and nature,
 Children and globalization
 Methodologies of researching children's worlds
 Ethics of researching children's worlds
 Otherness of childhood
 Animal geographies – studies the spaces and places occupied by animals in human culture, because
social life and space is heavily populated by animals of many differing kinds and in many differing ways
(e.g. farm animals, pets, wild animals in the city). Another impetus that has influenced the development
of the field are ecofeminist and other environmentalist viewpoints on nature-society relations (including
questions of animal welfare and rights).
 Language geography – studies the geographic distribution of language or its constituent elements.
There are two principal fields of study within the geography of language:
1. Geography of languages – deals with the distribution through history and space of
languages,[14]
2. Linguistic geography – deals with regional linguistic variations within languages.[15][16][17][18][19]
 Sexuality and space – encompasses all relationships and interactions between human sexuality,
space, and place, including the geographies of LGBT residence, public sex environments, sites of
queer resistance, global sexualities, sex tourism,[20] the geographies of prostitution and adult
entertainment, use of sexualised locations in the arts,[21][22] and sexual citizenship.[23]
 Religion geography – study of the influence of geography, i.e. place and space, on religious belief.[24]
 Development geography – study of the Earth's geography with reference to the standard of living and
quality of life of its human inhabitants. Measures development by looking at economic, political and social
factors, and seeks to understand both the geographical causes and consequences of varying
development, in part by comparing More Economically Developed Countries (MEDCs) with Less
Economically Developed Countries (LEDCs).
 Economic geography – study of the location, distribution and spatial organization of economic activities
across the world. Subjects of interest include but are not limited to the location of industries, economies of
agglomeration (also known as "linkages"), transportation, international trade and development, real estate,
gentrification, ethnic economies, gendered economies, core-periphery theory, the economics of urban
form, the relationship between the environment and the economy (tying into a long history of geographers
studying culture-environment interaction), and globalization.
 Marketing geography – a discipline within marketing analysis which uses geolocation (geographic
information) in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities.[25] It can be used in
any aspect of the marketing mix – the product, price, promotion, or place (geo targeting).
 Transportation geography – branch of economic geography that investigates spatial interactions
between people, freight and information. It studies humans and their use of vehicles or other modes of
traveling as well as how markets are serviced by flows of finished goods and raw materials.
 Health geography – application of geographical information, perspectives, and methods to the study of
health, disease, and health care, to provide a spatial understanding of a population's health, the distribution
of disease in an area, and the environment's effect on health and disease. It also deals with accessibility to
health care and spatial distribution of health care providers.
 Time geography – study of the temporal factor on spatial human activities within the following
constraints:

1. Authority - limits of accessibility to certain places or domains placed on individuals by owners or

authorities
2. Capability - limitations on the movement of individuals, based on their nature. For example, movement
is restricted by biological factors, such as the need for food, drink, and sleep
3. Coupling - restraint of an individual, anchoring him or her to a location while interacting with other
individuals in order to complete a task

 Historical geography – study of the human, physical, fictional, theoretical, and "real" geographies of the
past, and seeks to determine how cultural features of various societies across the planet emerged and
evolved, by understanding how a place or region changes through time, including how people have
interacted with their environment and created the cultural landscape.
 Political geography – study of the spatially uneven outcomes of political processes and the ways in which
political processes are themselves affected by spatial structures. Basically, the inter-relationships between
people, state, and territory.
 Electoral geography – study of the relationship between election results and the regions they affect
(such as the environmental impact of voting decisions), and of the effects of regional factors upon
voting behavior.
 Geopolitics – analysis of geography, history and social science with reference to spatial politics and
patterns at various scales, ranging from the level of the state to international.
 Strategic geography – concerned with the control of, or access to, spatial areas that affect the security
and prosperity of nations.
 Military geography – the application of geographic tools, information, and techniques to solve military
problems in peacetime or war.
 Population geography – study of the ways in which spatial variations in the distribution, composition,
migration, and growth of populations are related to the nature of places.
 Tourism geography – study of travel and tourism, as an industry and as a social and cultural activity, and
their effect on places, including the environmental impact of tourism, the geographies of tourism and
leisure economies, answering tourism industry and management concerns and the sociology of tourism
and locations of tourism.
 Urban geography – the study of urban areas, in terms of concentration, infrastructure, economy, and
environmental impacts.
Approaches of human geography[edit]

 Behavioral geography –
 Cognitive geography –
 Critical geography –
 Feminist geography –
 Marxist geography –
 Non-representational theory –
 Postcolonialism –
 Post-structuralism[26] –
 Qualitative geography – qualitative research tools and methods applied to geography.
Integrated geography[edit]

 Integrated geography – branch of geography that describes the spatial aspects of interactions between
humans and the natural world. It requires an understanding of the dynamics of geology, meteorology,
 hydrology, biogeography, ecology, and geomorphology, as well as the ways in which human societies
conceptualize the environment.
Geomatics[edit]

 Geomatics – branch of geography and the discipline of gathering, storing, processing, and delivering
geographic information, or spatially referenced information. It is a widespread interdisciplinary field that
includes the tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, cartography, Geographic
Information Systems (GIS), Global Navigation Satellite Systems, photogrammetry, and related forms of
earth mapping.
Fields contributing to geomatics[edit]

 Photogrammetry –
 Cartography –
 Digital terrain modelling –
 Geodesy –
 Geographic information systems –
 Geospatial –
 Global navigation satellite systems – (GPS, GLONASS, GALILEO, COMPASS)
 Global Positioning System –
 Hydrography –
 Mathematics –
 Navigation –
 Photogrammetry –
 Remote sensing –
 Surveying –
Regional geography[edit]
Regional geography – study of world regions. Attention is paid to unique characteristics of a particular region
such as its natural elements, human elements, and regionalization which covers the techniques of delineating
space into regions. Regional geography breaks down into the study of specific regions.
Region – an area, defined by physical characteristics, human characteristics, or functional characteristics. The
term is used in various ways among the different branches of geography. A region can be seen as a collection
of smaller units, such as a country and its political divisions, or as one part of a larger whole, as in a country on
a continent.
Supercontinents[edit]

Earth may have had a single supercontinent called "Pangaea"

List of supercontinents A supercontinent is a landmass comprising more than one continental core, or craton.

 Afro-Eurasia (formed 5 million years ago)

 Americas (formed 15 million years ago)
 Eurasia (formed 60 million years ago)
Continents[edit]
Continent – one of several large landmasses on Earth. They are generally identified by convention rather than
any specific criteria, but seven areas are commonly regarded as continents. They are:
1. Africa (outline) –
2. Antarctica –
3. Australia (outline) –
The Americas:
4. North America (outline) –
5. South America (outline) –
Eurasia:
6. Europe (outline) –
7. Asia (outline) –
Subregions[edit]
Subregion (list)
Biogeographic regions[edit]

Map of six of the world's eight ecozones

Nearctic
Palearctic
Afrotropic
Indomalaya
Australasia
Neotropic
Oceania and Antarctic ecozones not shown

Ecozone[edit]
Ecozone The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) developed a system of eight biogeographic realms
(ecozones):

 Nearctic 22.9 mil. km² (including most of North America)

 Palearctic 54.1 mil. km² (including the bulk of Eurasia and North Africa)
 Afrotropic 22.1 mil. km² (including Sub-Saharan Africa)
 Indomalaya 7.5 mil. km² (including the South Asian subcontinent and Southeast Asia)
 Australasia 7.7 mil. km² (including Australia, New Guinea, and neighboring islands). The
northern boundary of this zone is known as the Wallace line.
 Neotropic 19.0 mil. km² (including South America and the Caribbean)
 Oceania 1.0 mil. km² (including Polynesia, Fiji and Micronesia)
 Antarctic 0.3 mil. km² (including Antarctica).
Ecoregions[edit]
Ecoregion Ecozones are further divided into ecoregions. The World has over 800 terrestrial
ecoregions. See Lists of ecoregions by country.
 Geography of the political divisions of the World[edit]
 Geography of Africa (Outline) 
 West Africa#Geography and climate  Geography of Luxembourg (Outline)
 Geography of Benin (Outline)  Geography of Macedonia (Outline)
 Geography of Burkina Faso (Outline)  Geography of Malta (Outline)
 Geography of Cape Verde (Outline)  Geography of Moldova (Outline), including:
 Geography of Côte d'Ivoire (Outline)  Geography of Transnistria (Outline) (disputed
 Geography of Gambia (Outline) territory)
 Geography of Ghana (Outline)  Geography of Monaco (Outline)
 Geography of Guinea (Outline)  Geography of Montenegro (Outline)
 Geography of Guinea-Bissau (Outline)  Geography of Netherlands (Outline)
 Geography of Liberia (Outline)  Geography of Norway (Outline)
 Geography of Mali (Outline)  Geography of Poland (Outline)
 Geography of Mauritania (Outline)  Geography of Portugal (Outline)
 Geography of Niger (Outline)  Geography of Romania (Outline)
 Geography of Nigeria (Outline)  Geography of Russia (Outline)
 Geography of Senegal (Outline)  Geography of San Marino (Outline)
 Geography of Sierra Leone (Outline)  Geography of Serbia (Outline)
 Geography of Togo (Outline)  Geography of Slovakia (Outline)
 North Africa#Geography  Geography of Slovenia (Outline)
 Geography of Algeria (Outline)  Geography of Spain (Outline)
 Geography of Egypt (Outline)  Geography of Svalbard (Outline)
 Geography of Libya (Outline)  Geography of Sweden (Outline)
 Geography of Mauritania (Outline)  Geography of Switzerland (Outline)
 Geography of Morocco (Outline)  Geography of Turkey (Outline)
 Geography of Sudan (Outline)  Geography of Ukraine (Outline)
 Geography of Tunisia (Outline)  Geography of United Kingdom (Outline)
 Geography of Western Sahara (Outline)  Geography of England (Outline)
 Central Africa  Geography of Northern Ireland (Outline)
 Geography of Angola (Outline)  Geography of Scotland (Outline)
 Geography of Burundi (Outline)  Geography of Wales (Outline)
 Geography of Cameroon (Outline)  Geography of Vatican City (Outline)
 Geography of Central African  Geography of North America (Outline)
Republic (Outline)  Geography of Canada (Outline)
 Geography of Chad (Outline)  By province
 Geography of Democratic Republic of the  Geography of Alberta
Congo (Outline)  Geography of British Columbia (Outline)
 Geography of Equatorial Guinea (Outline)  Geography of Manitoba
 Geography of Gabon (Outline)  Geography of New Brunswick
 Geography of Republic of the  Geography of Newfoundland and Labrador
Congo (Outline)  Geography of Nova Scotia
 Geography of Rwanda (Outline)  Geography of Ontario
 Geography of São Tomé and  Geography of Prince Edward Island
Príncipe (Outline)
 Geography of Quebec (Outline)
 East Africa#Geography and climate
 Geography of Saskatchewan (Outline)
 Geography of Burundi (Outline)
 By territory
 Geography of Comoros (Outline)
 Geography of the Northwest Territories
 Geography of Djibouti (Outline)
 Geography of Nunavut
 Geography of Eritrea (Outline)
 Geography of Yukon
 Geography of Ethiopia (Outline)
 Geography of Greenland (Outline)
 Geography of Kenya (Outline)
 Geography of Mexico (Outline)
 Geography of Madagascar (Outline)
  Geography of Malawi (Outline)  Geography of Saint Pierre and Miquelon (Outline)
 Geography of Mauritius (Outline)  Geography of United States (Outline)
 Geography of Mozambique (Outline)  Geography of Alabama (Outline)
 Geography of Rwanda (Outline)  Geography of Alaska (Outline)
 Geography of Seychelles (Outline)  Geography of Arizona (Outline)
 Geography of Somalia (Outline)  Geography of Arkansas (Outline)
 Geography of Tanzania (Outline)  Geography of California (Outline)
 Geography of Uganda (Outline)  Geography of Colorado (Outline)
 Geography of Zambia (Outline)  Geography of Connecticut (Outline)
 Geography of Zimbabwe (Outline)  Geography of Delaware (Outline)
 Southern Africa#Geography  Geography of Florida (Outline)
 Geography of Botswana (Outline)  Geography of Georgia (Outline)
 Geography of Lesotho (Outline)  Geography of Hawaii (Outline)
 Geography of Namibia (Outline)  Geography of Idaho (Outline)
 Geography of South Africa (Outline)  Geography of Illinois (Outline)
 Geography of Swaziland (Outline)  Geography of Indiana (Outline)
 Dependencies in Africa  Geography of Iowa (Outline)
 Geography of British Indian Ocean  Geography of Montana (Outline)
Territory (Outline) (UK)  Geography of Kansas (Outline)
 Geography of Mayotte (Outline) (France)  Geography of Kentucky (Outline)
 Geography of Réunion (Outline) (France)  Geography of Louisiana (Outline)
 Geography of Saint Helena (Outline) (UK)  Geography of Maine (Outline)
 Canary  Geography of Maryland (Outline)
Islands#Geography (Outline) (Spain)  Geography of Massachusetts (Outline)
 Geography of Ceuta (Outline) (Spain)  Geography of Michigan (Outline)
 Geography of Madeira (Outline) (Portugal)  Geography of Minnesota (Outline)
 Geography of Melilla (Outline) (Spain)  Geography of Mississippi (Outline)
 Geography of Socotra (Outline) (Yemen)  Geography of Missouri (Outline)
 Geography of Puntland (Outline)  Geography of Nebraska (Outline)
 Geography of Somaliland (Outline)  Geography of Nevada (Outline)
 Sahrawi Arab Democratic  Geography of New Hampshire (Outline)
Republic (Outline)  Geography of New Jersey (Outline)
 Geography of Antarctica (Outline)  Geography of New Mexico (Outline)
 Geography of Asia (Outline)  Geography of New York (Outline)
 Central Asia#Geography  Geography of North Carolina (Outline)
 Geography of Kazakhstan (Outline)  Geography of North Dakota (Outline)
 Geography of Kyrgyzstan (Outline)  Geography of Ohio (Outline)
 Geography of Tajikistan (Outline)  Geography of Oklahoma (Outline)
 Geography of Turkmenistan (Outline)  Geography of Oregon (Outline)
 Geography of Uzbekistan (Outline)  Geography of Pennsylvania (Outline)
 East Asia  Geography of Rhode Island (Outline)
 Geography of China (Outline)  Geography of South Carolina (Outline)
 Geography of Tibet (Outline)  Geography of South Dakota (Outline)
 Geography of Hong Kong (Outline)  Geography of Tennessee (Outline)
 Geography of Macau (Outline)  Geography of Texas (Outline)
 Geography of Japan (Outline)  Geography of Utah (Outline)
 Geography of North Korea (Outline)  Geography of Vermont (Outline)
 Geography of South Korea (Outline)  Geography of Virginia (Outline)
 Geography of Mongolia (Outline)  Geography of Washington (Outline)
 Geography of Taiwan (Outline)  Geography of West Virginia (Outline)
 North Asia#Geography  Geography of Wisconsin (Outline)
 Geography of Russia (Outline)
  Southeast Asia#Geography  Geography of Wyoming (Outline)
 Geography of Brunei (Outline)  Geography of Washington, D.C. (Outline)
 Burma (Myanmar) - Outline) (Washington, D.C.)
 Geography of Cambodia (Outline)  Central America#Geography (Outline)
 East Timor (Timor-Leste) - Outline)  Geography of Belize (Outline)
 Geography of Indonesia (Outline)  Geography of Costa Rica (Outline)
 Geography of Laos (Outline)  Geography of El Salvador (Outline)
 Geography of Malaysia (Outline)  Geography of Guatemala (Outline)
 Geography of the Philippines (Outline)  Geography of Honduras (Outline)
 Geography of Singapore (Outline)  Geography of Nicaragua (Outline)
 Geography of Thailand (Outline)  Geography of Panama (Outline)
 Geography of Vietnam (Outline)  Geography of the Caribbean (Outline)
 South Asia#Geography  Geography of Anguilla (Outline)
 Geography of Afghanistan (Outline)  Geography of Antigua and Barbuda (Outline)
 Geography of Bangladesh (Outline)  Geography of Aruba (Outline)
 Geography of Bhutan (Outline)  Geography of Bahamas (Outline)
 Geography of India (Outline)  Geography of Barbados (Outline)
 Geography of Maldives (Outline)  Geography of Bermuda (Outline)
 Geography of Nepal (Outline)  British Virgin Islands#Geography (Outline)
 Geography of Pakistan (Outline)  Cayman Islands#Geography (Outline)
 Geography of Sri Lanka (Outline)  Geography of Cuba (Outline)
 Western Asia#Geography[27]  Geography of Dominica (Outline)
 Armenia#Geography (Outline)  Dominican Republic#Geography (Outline)
 Geography of Azerbaijan (Outline)  Geography of Grenada (Outline)
 Geography of Bahrain (Outline)  Geography of Haiti (Outline)
 Geography of Cyprus (Outline), including:  Geography of Jamaica (Outline)
 Geography of Northern  Geography of Montserrat (Outline)
Cyprus (Outline) (disputed territory)  Netherlands Antilles#Geography (Outline)
 Georgia (Outline)  Geography of Puerto Rico (Outline)
 Geography of Iran (Outline)  Geography of Saint Barthélemy (Outline)
 Geography of Iraq (Outline)  Geography of Saint Kitts and Nevis (Outline)
 Geography of Israel (Outline)  Geography of Saint Lucia (Outline)
 Geography of Jordan (Outline)  Saint Martin#Geography (Outline)
 Geography of Kuwait (Outline)  Geography of Saint Vincent and the
 Geography of Lebanon (Outline) Grenadines (Outline)
 Geography of Oman (Outline)  Geography of Trinidad and Tobago (Outline)
 Geography of the Palestinian  Turks and Caicos Islands#Geography (Outline)
territories (Outline)  United States Virgin Islands#Geography (Outline)
 Geography of Qatar (Outline)  Geography of Oceania (includes the continent of Australia)
 Geography of Saudi Arabia (Outline)  Australasia
 Geography of Syria (Outline)  Geography of Australia (Outline)
 Geography of Turkey (Outline)  Dependencies and territories of Australia
 Geography of United Arab  Geography of Christmas Island (Outline)
Emirates (Outline)  Cocos (Keeling)
 Geography of Yemen (Outline) Islands#Geography (Outline)
 Caucasus#Geography and ecology (a region  Geography of Norfolk Island (Outline)
considered to be in both Asia and Europe, or between  Geography of New Zealand (Outline)
them)  Geography of Melanesia
 North Caucasus  Geography of Fiji (Outline)
 Geography of Russia (Outline) (the  Geography of Indonesia (Outline) (Oceanian part
following parts of Russia are in the North only)
Caucasus: Chechnya, Ingushetia, Dagestan,  Geography of New Caledonia (Outline) (France)
 Adyghea, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachay–  Geography of Papua New Guinea (Outline)
Cherkessia, North Ossetia, Krasnodar Krai,  Geography of the Solomon Islands (Outline)
Stavropol Krai)  Geography of Vanuatu (Outline)
 South Caucasus  Geography of Micronesia
 Georgia (Outline), including:  Geography of Federated States of
 Geography of Abkhazia (Outline) Micronesia (Outline)
(disputed territory)  Geography of Guam (Outline) (USA)
 Geography of South Ossetia (Outline)  Geography of Kiribati (Outline)
(disputed territory)  Geography of Marshall Islands (Outline)
 Armenia#Geography (Outline)  Geography of Nauru (Outline)
 Geography of Azerbaijan (Outline),  Northern Mariana Islands#Geography and
including: climate (Outline) (USA)
 Geography of Nagorno-  Geography of Palau (Outline)
Karabakh (Outline) (disputed territory)  Geography of Wake Island (Outline) (USA)
 Geography of Europe (Outline)  Geography of Polynesia
 Geography of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (Outline)  Geography of American Samoa (Outline) (USA)
 Geography of Åland (Outline)  Chatham Islands#Geography (Outline) (NZ)
 Geography of Albania (Outline)  Cook Islands#Geography (Outline) (NZ)
 Geography of Andorra (Outline)  Easter Island#Location and physical
 Geography of Armenia (Outline) geography (Outline) (Chile)
 Geography of Austria (Outline)  Geography of French Polynesia (Outline) (France)
 Geography of Azerbaijan (Outline)  Geography of Hawaii (Outline) (USA)
 Geography of Belarus (Outline)  Loyalty Islands#Geography (Outline) (France)
 Geography of Belgium (Outline)  Geography of Niue (Outline) (NZ)
 Geography of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Outline)  Pitcairn Islands#Geography (Outline) (UK)
 Geography of Bulgaria (Outline)  Geography of Samoa (Outline)
 Geography of Croatia (Outline)  Geography of Tokelau (Outline) (NZ)
 Geography of Cyprus (Outline)  Geography of Tonga (Outline)
 Geography of Czech Republic (Outline)  Geography of Tuvalu (Outline)
 Geography of Denmark (Outline)  Geography of Wallis and Futuna (Outline)
 Geography of Estonia (Outline) (France)
 Faroe Islands#Geography (Outline)  Geography of South America (Outline)
 Geography of Finland (Outline)  Geography of Argentina (Outline)
 Geography of France (Outline)  Geography of Bolivia (Outline)
 Geography of Georgia (Outline)  Geography of Brazil (Outline)
 Geography of Germany (Outline)  Geography of Chile (Outline)
 Geography of Gibraltar (Outline)  Geography of Colombia (Outline)
 Geography of Greece (Outline)  Geography of Ecuador (Outline)
 Geography of Guernsey (Outline)  Geography of the Falkland Islands (Outline)
 Geography of Hungary (Outline)  Geography of French Guiana (Outline)
 Geography of Iceland (Outline)  Geography of Guyana (Outline)
 Republic of Ireland#Geography (Outline)  Geography of Paraguay (Outline)
 Geography of the Isle of Man (Outline)  Geography of Peru (Outline)
 Geography of Italy (Outline)  Geography of Suriname (Outline)
 Geography of Jersey (Outline)  Geography of Uruguay (Outline)
 Geography of Kazakhstan (Outline)  Geography of Venezuela (Outline)
 Geography of Kosovo (Outline)
 Geography of Latvia (Outline)
 Geography of Liechtenstein (Outline)
 Geography of Lithuania (Outline)
Other regions[edit]
 Atlantic World
 Bermuda Triangle
 Pacific Rim
 Pacific Ring of Fire

History of geography[edit]

Reconstruction of Hecataeus' map of the World, created during ancient Greek times

Main articles: History of geography and Historical geography

Topics pertaining to the geographical study of the World throughout history:
By period[edit]

 Ancient roads
 Ancient Greek geography
 Age of discovery
 Major explorations after the Age of Discovery
 Critical geography
 Environmental determinism
By region[edit]

 Chinese geography
 History of human geography in China
By subject[edit]

 Historical population of the world

By field[edit]
 History of human geography  History of physical geography
 History of cartography  History of biogeography
 History of longitude  History of climatology
 Longitude Prize  History of meteorology
 History of cultural geography  History of geodesy
 History of economic geography  History of geomorphology
 History of health geography  History of hydrology
 History of political geography  History of oceanography
 History of demography  History of landscape ecology
 History of regional geography

Elements of geography[edit]
Topics common to the various branches of geography include:
Tasks and tools of geography[edit]

The equal-area Mollweide projection

Main articles: Geosophy and Philosophy of geography

 Exploration – the act of traveling and searching for resources or for information about the land
or space itself.
 Geocode (Geospatial Entity Object Code) – geospatial coordinate system for specifying the
exact location of a geospatial point at, below, or above the surface of the earth at a given
moment of time.
 Geographic information system (GIS) – set of tools that captures, stores, analyzes, manages,
and presents data that are linked to location(s). Combines elements of cartography, statistical
analysis, and database technology.
 Globe – a three-dimensional scale model of a spheroid celestial body such as a planet, star, or
moon.
 Terrestrial globe – globe of the Earth.
 Map – a visual representation of an area, depicting the elements of that area such as objects,
regions, and themes.
 Atlas – a collection of maps, typically of the Earth or a region thereof.
 Cartography(outline) – the study and practice of making maps.
 Map projection – any method of representing the surface of a sphere or other shape on a
plane. Necessary for creating maps.
 Demographics – the characteristics of a human population as used in government, marketing
or opinion research, or the demographic profiles used in such research. Distinct from
demography, which is the statistical study of human populations.
 Spatial analysis – a variety of statistical techniques used to study entities using their
topological, geometric, or geographic properties.
 Surveying – the technique and science of accurately determining the terrestrial or three-
dimensional position of points and the distances and angles between them. These points are
usually on the surface of the Earth, and they are often used to establish land maps and
boundaries for ownership or governmental purposes.
Types of geographic features[edit]
Geographic feature – component of a planet that can be referred to as a location, place, site, area,
or region, and therefore may show up on a map. A geographic feature may be natural or artificial.
Location and place[edit]
 Population density per square kilometre by country, 2006

 Location –  Climate –
 Absolute location –  Population –
 Latitude –  Demographics –
 Prime meridian –  Population
 Longitude – density –
 Equator –  Overpopulation –
 Tropic of Cancer –  World population –
 Tropic of Capricorn –  Sense of place –
 Altitude –  Terrain –
 Elevation –  Topography –
 Place  Tourist attraction –
 Aspects of a place or region
 Lists of places –
Natural geographic features[edit]
Natural geographic feature – an ecosystem or natural landform.
Ecosystems[edit]
Ecosystem – community of living organisms in conjunction with the nonliving components of their
environment (things like air, water and mineral soil), interacting as a system. These biotic and
abiotic components are regarded as linked together through nutrient cycles and energy flows.

 Biodiversity hotspot
 Ecozone – broadest biogeographic division of the Earth's land surface, based on distributional
patterns of terrestrial organisms.
 Ecoprovince – biogeographic unit smaller than an ecozone that contains one or more
ecoregions.
 Ecoregion –
 Ecodistrict –
 Ecosection –
 Ecosite –
 Ecotope –
 Ecoelement –
 Biome –
 Bioregion –
 Biotope –
 Bioelement –
Natural landforms[edit]
 The Ganges river delta in Indiaand Bangladesh is one of the most fertile regions in the world.

The volcano Mount St. Helens in Washington, United States.

See also: List of landforms

Natural landform – terrain or body of water. Landforms are topographical elements, and are
defined by their surface form and location in the landscape. Landforms are categorized by traits
such as elevation, slope, orientation, stratification, rock exposure, and soil type. Some landforms
are artificial, such as certain islands, but most landforms are natural.
Natural terrain feature types[edit]

 Continent –
 Island –
 Mainland –
 Mountain –
 Mountain range –
 Subcontinent –
Natural body of water types[edit]  Estuary –
 Fjord (fiord) –
 Natural bodies of water –  Kettle –
 Bodies of sea water  Kill –
 Channel –  Lagoon –
 Firth –  Barachois –
 Harbor –  Loch –
 Inlet –  Arm of the sea –
 Bay –  Mere –
 Bight –  Ocean –
 Gulf –  Phytotelma –
 Cove –  Salt marsh –
 Creek (tidal) –  Sea –
  Types of sea: 
 Mediterranean  Parts of a river:
sea –  Rapid –
 Sound –  Source –
 Sea components or  Waterfall (list) –
extensions:  Roadstead –
 Sea loch –  Spring –
 Sea lough –  Boil -
 Strait –  Stream –
 Bodies of fresh water  Beck –
 Bayou –  Brook –
 Lake (list) –  Burn –
 Oxbow lake –  Creek –
 Subglacial lake –  Arroyo (creek) –
 Tarn –  Wash –
 Pool –  Draw –
 Pond –  Run –
 Billabong –  Wetland –
 Tide pool –  Freshwater marsh –
 Vernal pool –  Slough (wetland) –
 Puddle –  Mangrove swamp –
 River (list) –
Artificial geographic features[edit]
Artificial geographic feature – a thing that was made by humans that may be indicated on a map. It
may be physical and exist in the real world (like a bridge or city), or it may be abstract and exist
only on maps (such as the Equator, which has a defined location, but cannot be seen where it lies).

 Artificial geographic feature – physical construct that is part of the landscape

(and anthrosphere). Some examples include Tokyo, the Great Wall of China, the Suez
Canal, Interstate 5, and the Boeing Everett Factory.
 Settlement –
 Hamlet (place); rural settlement which is too small to be considered a village.
Historically, when a hamlet became large enough to justify building a church, it was
then classified as a village. One example of a hamlet is a small cluster of houses
surrounding a mill.
 Village – clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the
population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand (sometimes tens of
thousands).
 Town – human settlement larger than a village but smaller than a city. The size a
settlement must be in order to be called a "town" varies considerably in different parts
of the world, so that, for example, many American "small towns" seem to British people
to be no more than villages, while many British "small towns" would qualify as cities in
the United States.
 Urban hierarchy – ranks the structure of towns within an area.
 1st-order towns – bare minimum of essential services, such as bread and milk.
 2nd-order towns
 3rd-order towns
 4th-order towns
 City – relatively large and permanent settlement. In many regions, a city is distinguished
from a town by attainment of designation according to law, for instance being required
to obtain articles of incorporation or a royal charter.
 Financial centre
  Primate city – the leading city in its country or region, disproportionately larger than
any others in the urban hierarchy.
 Metropolis – very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political
and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or
international connections and communications.
 Metropolitan area – region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its
less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and
housing.[28]
 Global city – city that is deemed to be an important node in the global economic
system. Globalization is largely created, facilitated and enacted in strategic
geographic locales (including global cities) according to a hierarchy of importance
to the operation of the global system of finance and trade.
 Megalopolis – chain of roughly adjacent metropolitan areas. An example is the
huge metropolitan area along the eastern seaboard of the U.S. extending from
Boston, Massachusetts through New York City; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Baltimore, Maryland and ending in Washington, D.C..
 Eperopolis – theoretical "continent city". The world does not have one yet. Will
Europe become the first one?
 Ecumenopolis – theoretical "world city". Will the world ever become so urbanized
as to be called this?
 Engineered construct – built feature of the landscape such as
a highway, bridge, airport, railroad, building, dam, or reservoir. See also construction
engineering and infrastructure.
 Artificial landforms
 Artificial dwelling hill –
 Artificial island –
 Artificial reef –
 Airport – place where airplanes can take off and land, including one or more runways
and one or more passenger terminals.
 Aqueduct – artificial channel that is constructed to convey water from one location to
another.
 Breakwater – construction designed to break the force of the sea to provide calm water
for boats or ships, or to prevent erosion of a coastal feature.
 Bridge – structure built to span a valley, road, body of water, or other physical obstacle
such as a canyon, for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle.
 Building – closed structure with walls and a roof.
 Canal – artificial waterway, often connecting one body of water with another.
 Causeway –
 Dam – structure placed across a flowing body of water to stop the flow, usually to use
the water for irrigation or to generate electricity.
 Dike – barrier of stone or earth used to hold back water and prevent flooding.
 Levee – artificial slope or wall to regulate water levels, usually earthen and
often parallel to the course of a river or the coast.[29]
 Farm – place where agricultural activities take place, especially the growing of crops or
the raising of livestock.
 Manmade harbor – harbor that has deliberately constructed breakwaters, sea walls, or
jettys, or which was constructed by dredging.
 Industrial region
 Marina –
 Orchard –
 Parking lot –
 Pier –
 Pipeline –
 Port –
  Railway –
 Ranch –
 Reservoir –
 Road –
 Highway –
 Race track –
 Street –
 Subsidence crater –
 Ski resort –
 Train station –
 Tree farm –
 Tunnel –
 Viaduct –
 Wharf –

Provinces and territorial disputes of the People's Republic of China

 Abstract geographic feature – does not exist physically in the real world, yet has a location by
definition and may be displayed on maps.
 Geographical zone
 Hardiness zone
 Time zone
 Political division –
 Nation
 Administrative division –
 Special Economic Zone
 Country subdivision – a designated territory created within a country for administrative or
identification purposes. Examples of the types of country subdivisions:
 Bailiwick –  Province –
 Canton –  Region –
 Commune –  Rural district –
 County –  Settlement –
 Department –  Municipality –
 District –  City –
 Duchy –  Borough –
 Emirate –  Township –
 Federal state –  Village –
 Parish –  Shire –
 Prefecture –  State –
  Subdistrict –  Latitude line –
 Subprefecture –  Equator –
 Voivodeship –  Longitude line –
 Wilayat –  Prime Meridian) –
 Cartographical feature –  Geographical pole –
theoretical construct used  North pole –
specifically on maps that  South pole –
doesn't have any physical form
apart from its location.
Geographic features that include the natural and artificial[edit]

 Waterway (list) –

Geography awards[edit]

Hubbard Medal awarded to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, showing her flight route

See also: List of prizes, medals, and awards § Geography

Some awards and competitions in the field of geography:

 Geography Cup –
 Gold Medal –
 Hubbard Medal –
 National Geographic World Championship –
 Victoria Medal –

Persons influential in geography[edit]

Main articles: Geographer, List of geographers, and List of Graeco-Roman geographers
A geographer is a scientist who studies Earth's physical environment and human habitat.
Geographers are historically known for making maps, the subdiscipline of geography known
as cartography. They study the physical details of the environment and also its effect on human
and wildlife ecologies, weatherand climate patterns, economics, and culture. Geographers focus
on the spatial relationships between these elements.
Influential physical geographers[edit]
 Alexander Von Humboldt, considered to be the founding father of physical geography.

Richard Chorley, 20th-century geographer who progressed quantitative geography and who
helped bring the systems approach to geography.

 Eratosthenes (276 – 194 BC) – who made the first known reliable estimation of the Earth's
size.[30] He is considered the father of geodesy.[30][31]
 Ptolemy (c.90 – c.168) – who compiled Greek and Roman knowledge to produce the
book Geographia.
 Abū Rayhān Bīrūnī (973 – 1048 AD) – considered the father of geodesy.[32][33][verification needed]
 Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037) – whose observations in Kitab Al-Shifa contributed to later
formulations of the law of superposition and concept of uniformitarianism.[34]
 Muhammad al-Idrisi (Dreses, 1100 – c.1165) – who drew the Tabula Rogeriana, the most
accurate world map in pre-modern times.[35]
 Piri Reis (1465 – c.1554) – whose Piri Reis map is the oldest surviving world map to include
the Americas and possibly Antarctica
 Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) – an innovative cartographer and originator of the Mercator
projection.
 Bernhardus Varenius (1622–1650) – Wrote his important work "General Geography" (1650) –
first overview of the geography, the foundation of modern geography.
 Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–1765) – father of Russian geography and founded the study of
glaciology.
 Alexander Von Humboldt (1769–1859) – considered the father of modern geography.
Published Kosmos and founded the study of biogeography.
 Arnold Henry Guyot (1807–1884) – who noted the structure of glaciers and advanced the
understanding of glacial motion, especially in fast ice flow.
 Louis Agassiz (1807–1873) – the author of a glacial theory which disputed the notion of a
steady-cooling Earth.
 Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) – founder of modern biogeography and the Wallace line.
 Vasily Dokuchaev (1846–1903) – patriarch of Russian geography and founder of pedology.
 Wladimir Peter Köppen (1846–1940) – developer of most important climate classification and
founder of Paleoclimatology.
 William Morris Davis (1850–1934) – father of American geography, founder of Geomorphology
and developer of the geographical cycle theory.
 Walther Penck (1888–1923) – proponent of the cycle of erosion and the simultaneous
occurrence of uplift and denudation.
 Sir Ernest Shackleton (1874–1922) – Antarctic explorer during the Heroic Age of Antarctic
Exploration.
 Robert E. Horton (1875–1945) – founder of modern hydrology and concepts such as infiltration
capacity and overland flow.
 J Harlen Bretz (1882–1981) – pioneer of research into the shaping of landscapes by
catastrophic floods, most notably the Bretz (Missoula) floods.
 Willi Dansgaard (born 1922) – palaeoclimatologist and quaternary scientist, instrumental in the
use of oxygen-isotope dating and co-identifier of Dansgaard-Oeschger events.
 Hans Oeschger (1927–1998) – palaeoclimatologist and pioneer in ice core research, co-
identifier of Dansgaard-Orschger events.
 Richard Chorley (1927–2002) – a key contributor to the quantitative revolution and the use
of systems theory in geography.
 Sir Nicholas Shackleton (1937–2006) – who demonstrated that oscillations in climate over the
past few million years could be correlated with variations in the orbital and positional
relationship between the Earth and the Sun.
 Stefan Rahmstorf (born 1960) – professor of abrupt climate changes and author on theories of
thermohaline dynamics.
Influential human geographers[edit]
Paul Vidal de la Blache

Sketch of Carl Ritter

David Harvey

 Carl Ritter (1779–1859) – considered to be one of the founding fathers of modern geography
and first chair in geography at the Humboldt University of Berlin, also noted for his use of
organic analogy in his works.
 Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) – environmental determinist, invented the term Lebensraum
 Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918) – founder of the French School
of geopolitics and possibilism.
 Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861–1947) – author of The Geographical Pivot of History, co-
founder of the London School of Economics, along with the Geographical Association.
 Carl O. Sauer (1889–1975) – critic of environmental determinism and proponent of cultural
ecology.
 Walter Christaller (1893–1969) – economic geographer and developer of the central place
theory.
 Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) – scholar of the history and philosophy of geography.
 Torsten Hägerstrand (1916–2004) – critic of the quantitative revolution and regional science,
noted figure in critical geography.
 Milton Santos (1926–2001) winner of the Vautrin Lud prize in 1994, one of the most important
geographers in South America.
 Waldo R. Tobler (born 1930) – developer of the First law of geography.
 Yi-Fu Tuan (born 1930) A Chinese-American geographer.
 David Harvey (born 1935) – world's most cited academic geographer and winner of the Lauréat
Prix International de Géographie Vautrin Lud, also noted for his work in critical geography and
critique of global capitalism.
 Evelyn Stokes (1936–2005). Professor of geography at the University of Waikato in New
Zealand. Known for recognizing inequality with marginalized groups including women
and Māori using geography.
 Allen J. Scott (born 1938) – winner of Vautrin Lud Prize in 2003 and the Anders Retzius Gold
medal 2009; author of numerous books and papers on economic and urban geography, known
for his work on regional development, new industrial spaces, agglomeration theory, global city-
regions and the cultural economy.
 Edward Soja (born 1941) – noted for his work on regional development, planning and
governance, along with coining the terms synekism and postmetropolis.
 Doreen Massey (born 1944) – key scholar in the space and places of globalization and its
pluralities, winner of the Vautrin Lud Prize.
 Michael Watts, Class of 1963 Professor of Geography and Development Studies, University of
California, Berkeley
 Nigel Thrift (born 1949) – developer of non-representational theory.
 Derek Gregory (born 1951) – famous for writing on the Israeli, U.S. and UK actions in the
Middle East after 9/11, influenced by Edward Said and has contributed work on imagined
geographies.
 Cindi Katz (born 1954) – who writes on social reproduction and the production of space.
Writing on children's geographies, place and nature, everyday life and security.
 Gillian Rose (born 1962) – most famous for her critique: Feminism & Geography: The Limits of
Geographical Knowledge (1993) – which was one of the first moves towards a development
of feminist geography.

Geography educational frameworks[edit]

Educational frameworks upon which primary and secondary school curricula for geography are
based upon include:

 Five themes of geography[36] –

1. Location – a position or point that something occupies on the Earth's surface.
2. Place –
3. Human-environment interaction –
4. movement –
5. Region –
 The six "essential elements" identified by the Geography Education Standards
Project,[37] under which the National Geography Standards they developed are organized:[38][39]
1. The World in spatial terms
2. Places and regions
3. Physical systems
4. Human systems
5. Environment and society
6. The uses of geography
 The three content areas of geography from the 2010 National Assessment of Educational
Progress[40] (U.S.):
1. Space and place
2. Environment and society
3. Spatial dynamics and connections
History of geography

The history of geography includes many histories of geography which have differed over time and between
different cultural and political groups. In more recent developments, geography has become a distinct
academic discipline. 'Geography' derives from the Greek γεωγραφία – geographia,[1] a literal translation of
which would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography"
was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC). However, there is evidence for recognizable practices of geography, such
as cartography (or map-making) prior to the use of the term geography.

Egypt[edit]
The known world of Ancient Egypt saw the Nile as the centre, and the world as based upon "the" river. Various
oases were known to the east and west, and were considered locations of various gods (e.g. Siwa, for
Amon)12 . To the South lay the Kushitic region, known as far as the 4th cataract. Punt was a region south
along the shores of the Red Sea. Various Asiatic peoples were known as Retenu, Kanaan, Que, Harranu, or
Khatti (Hittites). At various times especially in the Late Bronze Age Egyptians had diplomatic and trade
relationships with Babylonia and Elam. The Mediterranean was called "the Great Green" and was believed to
be part of a world encircling ocean. Europe was unknown although may have become part of the Egyptian
world view in Phoenician times. To the west of Asia lay the realms of Keftiu, possibly Crete, and Mycenae
(thought to be part of a chain of islands, that joined Cyprus, Crete, Southern Italy, Sicily and later
perhaps Sardinia, Corsica and the Balarics to Africa.[2]

Babylon[edit]
The oldest known world maps date back to ancient Babylon from the 9th century BC.[3] The best
known Babylonian world map, however, is the Imago Mundi of 600 BC.[4]The map as reconstructed by Eckhard
Unger shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu[5] and
several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" (Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it so as to
form a seven-pointed star. The accompanying text mentions seven outer regions beyond the encircling ocean.
The descriptions of five of them have survived.[6]
In contrast to the Imago Mundi, an earlier Babylonian world map dating back to the 9th century BC depicted
Babylon as being further north from the center of the world, though it is not certain what that center was
supposed to represent.[3]

Greco-Roman world[edit]
See also: List of Graeco-Roman geographers
The ancient Greeks saw the poet Homer as the founder of geography. His works the Iliad and the Odyssey are
works of literature, but both contain a great deal of geographical information. Homer describes a circular world
ringed by a single massive ocean. The works show that the Greeks by the 8th century BC had considerable
knowledge of the geography of the eastern Mediterranean. The poems contain a large number of place names
and descriptions, but for many of these it is uncertain what real location, if any, is actually being referred to.
Thales of Miletus is one of the first known philosophers known to have wondered about the shape of the world.
He proposed that the world was based on water, and that all things grew out of it. He also laid down many of
the astronomical and mathematical rules that would allow geography to be studied scientifically. His
successor Anaximanderis the first person known to have attempted to create a scale map of the known world
and to have introduced the gnomon to Ancient Greece.
Reconstruction of the map of Hecataeus of Miletus.

Hecataeus of Miletus initiated a different form of geography, avoiding the mathematical calculations of Thales
and Anaximander he learnt about the world by gathering previous works and speaking to the sailors who came
through the busy port of Miletus. From these accounts he wrote a detailed prose account of what was known of
the world. A similar work, and one that mostly survives today, is Herodotus' Histories. While primarily a work of
history, the book contains a wealth of geographic descriptions covering much of the known world. Egypt,
Scythia, Persia, and Asia Minor are all described,[7] including a mention of India.[8] The description of Africa as
a whole are contentious,[9] with Herodotus describing the land surrounded by a sea.[10] Though, historically the
Indian sea was thought of an inland sea which was that round of the southern part of Africa is surrounded by
the eastern part of Asia by connecting land, which inference only after the circumnavigation of Africa by Vasco
da Gama was abandoned by the western cartographers of the 15th century.[11] Some, though, hold that the
descriptions of areas such as India are mostly imaginary.[12] Regardless, Herodotus made important
observations about geography. He is the first to have noted the process by which large rivers, such as the Nile,
build up deltas, and is also the first recorded as observing that winds tend to blow from colder regions to
warmer ones.
Pythagoras was perhaps the first to propose a spherical world, arguing that the sphere was the most perfect
form. This idea was embraced by Plato and Aristotle presented empirical evidence to verify this. He noted that
the Earth's shadow during an eclipse is curved, and also that stars increase in height as one moves
north. Eudoxus of Cnidus used the idea of a sphere to explain how the sun created differing climatic zones
based on latitude. This led the Greeks to believe in a division of the world into five regions. At each of the poles
was an uncharitably cold region. While extrapolating from the heat of the Sahara it was deduced that the area
around the equator was unbearably hot. Between these extreme regions both the northern and southern
hemispheres had a temperate belt suitable for human habitation.
Hellenistic period[edit]
These theories clashed with the evidence of explorers, however, Hanno the Navigator had traveled as far
south as Sierra Leone, and it is possible other Phoenicians had circumnavigated Africa[citation needed]. In the 4th
century BC the Greek explorer Pytheas traveled through northeast Europe, and circled the British Isles. He
found that the region was considerably more habitable than theory expected, but his discoveries were largely
dismissed by his contemporaries because of this. Conquerors also carried out exploration, for
example, Caesar's invasions of Britain and Germany, expeditions/invasions sent by Augustus to Arabia
Felix and Ethiopia (Res Gestae 26), and perhaps the greatest Ancient Greek explorer of all, Alexander the
Great, who deliberately set out to learn more about the east through his military expeditions and so took a
large number of geographers and writers with his army who recorded their observations as they moved east.
The ancient Greeks divided the world into three continents, Europe, Asia, and Libya (Africa).
The Hellespont formed the border between Europe and Asia. The border between Asia and Libya was
generally considered to be the Nile river, but some geographers, such as Herodotus objected to this.
Herodotus argued that there was no difference between the people on the east and west sides of the Nile, and
that the Red Sea was a better border. The relatively narrow habitable band was considered to run from the
Atlantic Ocean in the west to an unknown sea somewhere east of India in the east. The southern portion of
Africa was unknown, as was the northern portion of Europe and Asia, so it was believed that they were circled
by a sea. These areas were generally considered uninhabitable.
The size of the Earth was an important question to the Ancient Greeks. Eratosthenes attempted to calculate its
circumference by measuring the angle of the sun at two different locations. While his numbers were
problematic, most of the errors cancelled themselves out and he got quite an accurate figure. Since the
distance from the Atlantic to India was roughly known, this raised the important question of what was in the
vast region east of Asia and to the west of Europe. Crates of Mallus proposed that there were in fact four
inhabitable land masses, two in each hemisphere. In Rome a large globe was created depicting this world.
That some of the figures Eratosthenes had used in his calculation were considerably in error became known,
and Posidonius set out to get a more accurate measurement. This number actually was considerably smaller
than the real one, but it became accepted that the eastern part of Asia was not a huge distance from Europe.
Roman period[edit]

A 15th-century depiction of the Ptolemy world map, reconstituted from Ptolemy's Geographia (c. 150)

While the works of almost all earlier geographers have been lost, many of them are partially known through
quotations found in Strabo (64/63 BC – ca. AD 24). Strabo's seventeen volume work of geography is almost
completely extant, and is one of the most important sources of information on classical geography. Strabo
accepted the narrow band of habitation theory, and rejected the accounts of Hanno and Pytheas as fables.
None of Strabo's maps survive, but his detailed descriptions give a clear picture of the status of geographical
knowledge of the time. Pliny the Elder's (AD 23 – 79) Natural History also has sections on geography. A
century after Strabo Ptolemy (AD 90 – 168) launched a similar undertaking. By this time the Roman Empire
had expanded through much of Europe, and previously unknown areas such as the British Isles had been
explored. The Silk Road was also in operation, and for the first time knowledge of the far east began to be
known. Ptolemy's Geographia opens with a theoretical discussion about the nature and techniques of
geographical inquiry, and then moves to detailed descriptions of much the known world. Ptolemy lists a huge
number of cities, tribes, and sites and places them in the world. It is uncertain what Ptolemy's names
correspond to in the modern world, and a vast amount of scholarship has gone into trying to link Ptolemaic
descriptions to known locations.
It was the Romans who made far more extensive practical use of geography and maps. The Roman
transportation system, consisting of 55,000 miles of roads, could not have been designed without the use of
geographical systems of measurement and triangulation. The cursus publicus, a department of the Roman
government devoted to transportation, employed full-time grommatici (surveyors). The surveyors’ job was to
gather topographical information and then to determine the straightest possible route where a road might be
built. Instruments and principles used included sun dials for determining direction, theodolites for measuring
horizontal angles,[13] and triangulationwithout which the creation of perfectly straight stretches, some as long as
35 miles, would have been impossible. During the Greco-Roman era, those who performed geographical work
could be divided into four categories:[14]

 Land surveyors determined the exact dimensions of a particular area such as a field, dividing the land into
plots for distribution, or laying out the streets in a town.
 Cartographical surveyors made maps, involving finding latitudes, longitudes and elevations.
 Military surveyors were called upon to determine such information as the width of a river an army would
need to cross.
 Engineering surveyors investigated terrain in order to prepare the way for roads, canals, aqueducts,
tunnels and mines.
Around AD 400 a scroll map called the Peutinger Table was made of the known world, featuring the Roman
road network. Besides the Roman Empire which at that time spanned from Britain to the Middle East and
Africa, the map includes India, Sri Lanka and China. Cities are demarcated using hundreds of symbols. It
measures 1.12 ft high and 22.15 ft long. The tools and principles of geography used by the Romans would be
closely followed with little practical improvement for the next 700 years.[15]

India[edit]
A vast corpus of Indian texts embraced the study of geography. The Vedas and Puranas contain elaborate
descriptions of rivers and mountains and treat the relationship between physical and human
elements.[16] According to religious scholar Diana Eck, a notable feature of geography in India is its
interweaving with Hindu mythology,[17]
No matter where one goes in India, one will find a landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests, and villages
are elaborately linked to the stories and gods of Indian culture. Every place in this vast country has its story;
and conversely, every story of Hindu myth and legend has its place.

Ancient period[edit]
The geographers of ancient India put forward theories regarding the origin of the earth. They theorized that the
earth was formed by the solidification of gaseous matter and that the earth's crust is composed of hard rocks
(sila), clay (bhumih) and sand (asma).[18] Theories were also propounded to explain earthquakes (bhukamp)
and it was assumed that earth, air and water combined to cause earthquakes.[18] The Arthashastra, a
compendium by Kautilya (also known as Chanakya) contains a range of geographical and statistical
information about the various regions of India.[16] The composers of the Puranas divided the known world into
seven continents of dwipas, Jambu Dwipa, Krauncha Dwipa, Kusha Dwipa, Plaksha Dwipa, Pushkara Dwipa,
Shaka Dwipa and Shalmali Dwipa. Descriptions were provided for the climate and geography of each of the
dwipas.[18]
Early Medieval period[edit]
The Vishnudharmottara Purana (compiled between 300-350 AD) contains six chapters on physical and human
geography. The locational attributes of peoples and places, and various seasons are the topics of these
chapters.[16] Varahamihira's Brihat-Samhita gave a thorough treatment of planetary movements, rainfall, clouds
and the formation of water.[18] The mathematician-astronomer Aryabhata gave a precise estimate of the earth's
circumference in his treatise Āryabhaṭīya.[16] Aryabhata accurately calculated the Earth's circumference as
24,835 miles, which was only 0.2% smaller than the actual value of 24,902 miles.
Late Medieval period[edit]
The Mughal chronicles Tuzuk-i-Jehangiri, Ain-i-Akbari and Dastur-ul-aml contain detailed geographical
narratives.[16] These were based on the earlier geographical works of India and the advances made by
medieval Muslim geographers, particularly the work of Alberuni.

China[edit]
Main article: Chinese geography
See also: History of cartography: China
An early Western Han dynasty (202 BC – 9 AD) silk map found in tomb 3 of Mawangdui Han tombs site,
depicting the Kingdom of Changsha and Kingdom of Nanyue in southern China (note: the south direction is
oriented at the top, north at the bottom).

The Yu Ji Tu, or Map of the Tracks of Yu Gong, carved into stone in 1137,[19] located in the Stele
Forest of Xian. This 3 feet (0.91 m) squared map features a graduated scale of 100 li for each rectangular grid.
China's coastline and river systems are clearly defined and precisely pinpointed on the map. "Yu" refers to Yu
the Great, a Chinese deity and the author of the Yu Gong, the geographic chapter of the Book of Documents,
dating to the 5th century BC from whence this map is derived.

In China, the earliest known geographical Chinese writing dates back to the 5th century BC, during the
beginning of the Warring States period (481 BC – 221 BC).[20] This work was the Yu Gong ('Tribute of Yu')
chapter of the Shu Jing or Book of Documents, which describes the traditional nine provinces of ancient China,
their kinds of soil, their characteristic products and economic goods, their tributary goods, their trades and
vocations, their state revenues and agricultural systems, and the various rivers and lakes listed and placed
accordingly.[20] The nine provinces at the time of this geographical work were relatively small in size compared
to those of modern China with the book's descriptions pertaining to areas of the Yellow River, the lower valleys
of the Yangtze and the plain between them as well as the Shandong peninsula and to the west the most
northern parts of the Wei and Han Rivers along with the southern parts of modern-day Shanxi province.[20]
In this ancient geographical treatise, which would greatly influence later Chinese geographers and
cartographers, the Chinese used the mythological figure of Yu the Great to describe the known earth (of the
Chinese). Apart from the appearance of Yu, however, the work was devoid of magic, fantasy, Chinese folklore,
or legend.[21] Although the Chinese geographical writing in the time of Herodotus and Strabo were of lesser
quality and contained less systematic approach, this would change from the 3rd century onwards, as Chinese
methods of documenting geography became more complex than those found in Europe, a state of affairs that
would persist until the 13th century.[22]
The earliest extant maps found in archeological sites of China date to the 4th century BC and were made in the
ancient State of Qin.[23] The earliest known reference to the application of a geometric grid and mathematically
graduated scale to a map was contained in the writings of the cartographer Pei Xiu (224–271).[24] From the 1st
century AD onwards, official Chinese historical texts contained a geographical section, which was often an
enormous compilation of changes in place-names and local administrative divisions controlled by the ruling
dynasty, descriptions of mountain ranges, river systems, taxable products, etc.[25]The ancient Chinese
historian Ban Gu (32–92) most likely started the trend of the gazetteer in China, which became prominent in
the Northern and Southern dynasties period and Sui dynasty.[26] Local gazetteers would feature a wealth of
geographic information, although its cartographic aspects were not as highly professional as the maps created
by professional cartographers.[26]
From the time of the 5th century BC Shu Jing forward, Chinese geographical writing provided more concrete
information and less legendary element. This example can be seen in the 4th chapter of the Huainanzi (Book
of the Master of Huainan), compiled under the editorship of Prince Liu An in 139 BC during the Han
dynasty (202 BC – 202 AD). The chapter gave general descriptions of topography in a systematic fashion,
given visual aids by the use of maps (di tu) due to the efforts of Liu An and his associate Zuo Wu.[27] In Chang
Chu's Hua Yang Guo Chi (Historical Geography of Szechuan) of 347, not only rivers, trade routes, and various
tribes were described, but it also wrote of a 'Ba Jun Tu Jing' ('Map of Szechuan'), which had been made much
earlier in 150.[28] The Shui Jing (Waterways Classic) was written anonymously in the 3rd century during
the Three Kingdoms era (attributed often to Guo Pu), and gave a description of some 137 rivers found
throughout China.[29] In the 6th century, the book was expanded to forty times its original size by the
geographers Li Daoyuan, given the new title of Shui Jing Zhu (The Waterways Classic Commented).[29]
In later periods of the Song dynasty (960–1279) and Ming dynasty (1368–1644), there were much more
systematic and professional approaches to geographic literature. The Song dynasty poet, scholar, and
government official Fan Chengda (1126–1193) wrote the geographical treatise known as the Gui Hai Yu Heng
Chi.[30] It focused primarily on the topography of the land, along with the agricultural, economic and commercial
products of each region in China's southern provinces.[30] The polymath Chinese scientist Shen Kuo (1031–
1095) devoted a significant amount of his written work to geography, as well as a hypothesis of land formation
(geomorphology) due to the evidence of marine fossils found far inland, along with bamboo fossils found
underground in a region far from where bamboo was suitable to grow. The 14th-century Yuan
dynasty geographer Na-xin wrote a treatise of archeological topography of all the regions north of the Yellow
River, in his book He Shuo Fang Gu Ji.[31] The Ming dynasty geographer Xu Xiake(1587–1641) traveled
throughout the provinces of China (often on foot) to write his enormous geographical and topographical
treatise, documenting various details of his travels, such as the locations of small gorges, or mineral beds such
as mica schists.[32] Xu's work was largely systematic, providing accurate details of measurement, and his work
(translated later by Ding Wenjiang) read more like a 20th-century field surveyor than an early 17th-century
scholar.[32]
The Chinese were also concerned with documenting geographical information of foreign regions far outside of
China. Although Chinese had been writing of civilizations of the Middle East, India, and Central Asia since the
traveler Zhang Qian (2nd century BC), later Chinese would provide more concrete and valid information on the
topography and geographical aspects of foreign regions. The Tang dynasty (618–907) Chinese diplomat Wang
Xuance traveled to Magadha (modern northeastern India) during the 7th century. Afterwards he wrote the
book Zhang Tian-zhu Guo Tu (Illustrated Accounts of Central India), which included a wealth of geographical
information.[31] Chinese geographers such as Jia Dan (730–805) wrote accurate descriptions of places far
abroad. In his work written between 785 and 805, he described the sea route going into the mouth of
the Persian Gulf, and that the medieval Iranians (whom he called the people of the Luo-He-Yi country,
i.e. Persia) had erected 'ornamental pillars' in the sea that acted as lighthouse beacons for ships that might go
astray.[33] Confirming Jia's reports about lighthouses in the Persian Gulf, Arabic writers a century after Jia wrote
of the same structures, writers such as al-Mas'udi and al-Muqaddasi. The later Song dynasty ambassador Xu
Jing wrote his accounts of voyage and travel throughout Korea in his work of 1124, the Xuan-He Feng Shi Gao
Li Tu Jing (Illustrated Record of an Embassy to Korea in the Xuan-He Reign Period).[31] The geography of
medieval Cambodia(the Khmer Empire) was documented in the book Zhen-La Feng Tu Ji of 1297, written
by Zhou Daguan.[31]

Middle Ages[edit]
Byzantine Empire and Syria[edit]
After the fall of the western Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, ruled from Constantinople and known
as the Byzantine Empire, continued to thrive and produced several noteworthy geographers. Stephanus of
Byzantium (6th century) was a grammarian at Constantinople and authored the important geographical
dictionary Ethnica. This work is of enormous value, providing well-referenced geographical and other
information about ancient Greece.
The geographer Hierocles (6th century) authored the Synecdemus (prior to AD 535) in which he provides a
table of administrative divisions of the Byzantine Empire and lists the cities in each. The Synecdemus and
the Ethnica were the principal sources of Constantine VII's work on the Themes or divisions of Byzantium, and
are the primary sources we have today on political geography of the sixth-century East.
George of Cyprus is known for his Descriptio orbis Romani (Description of the Roman world), written in the
decade 600–610.[34] Beginning with Italy and progressing counterclockwise including Africa, Egypt and
the western Middle East, George lists cities, towns, fortresses and administrative divisions of the Byzantine or
Eastern Roman Empire.
Cosmas Indicopleustes, (6th century) also known as "Cosmas the Monk," was an Alexandrian merchant.[35] By
the records of his travels, he seems to have visited India, Sri Lanka, the Kingdom of Axum in modern Ethiopia,
and Eritrea. Included in his work Christian Topography were some of the earliest world maps.[36][37][38] Though
Cosmas believed the earth to be flat, most Christian geographers of his time disagreed with him. [39]
Syrian bishop Jacob of Edessa (633–708) adapted scientific material sourced
from Aristotle, Theophrastus, Ptolemy and Basil to develop a carefully structured picture of the cosmos. He
corrects his sources and writes more scientifically, whereas Basil’s Hexaemeron is theological in style.[40]
Karl Müller has collected and printed several anonymous works of geography from this era, including
the Expositio totius mundi.
Islamic world[edit]
Main article: Geography and cartography in medieval Islam
In the latter 7th century, adherents of the new religion of Islam surged northward out of Arabia taking over
lands in which Jews, Byzantine Christians and PersianZoroastrians had been established for centuries. There,
carefully preserved in the monasteries and libraries, they discovered the Greek classics which included great
works of geography by Egyptian Ptolemy's Almagest and Geography, along with the geographical wisdom of
the Chinese and the great accomplishments of the Roman Empire. The Arabs, who spoke only Arabic,
employed Christians and Jews to translate these and many other manuscripts into Arabic.
The primary geographical scholarship of this era occurred in Persia, today’s Iran, in the great learning center
the House of Wisdom at Baghdad, today's Iraq. Early caliphs did not follow orthodoxy and so they encouraged
scholarship.[41] Under their rule, native non-Arabs served as mawali or dhimmi,[42] and most geographers in this
period were Syrian (Byzantine) or Persian, i.e. of either Zoroastrian or Christian background.[citation needed]
Persians who wrote on geography or created maps during the Middle Ages included:

 Jābir ibn Hayyān (Geber or Jabir) (721– c. 815) Wrote extensively on many subjects, expanded on the
wisdom of the Greek classics and engaged in experimentation in natural science. It is unclear whether he
was Persian or Syrian.[43]
 Al-Khwārizmī (780–850) wrote The Image of the Earth (Kitab surat al-ard), in which he used
the Geography (Ptolemy) of Ptolemy but improved upon his values for the Mediterranean Sea, Asia,
and Africa.
 Ibn Khurdadhbih (820–912) authored a book of administrative geography Book of the Routes and
Provinces (Kitab al-masalik wa’l-mamalik), which is the earliest surviving Arabic work of its kind. He made
the first quadratic scheme map of four sectors.
 Sohrab or Sorkhab[44] (died 930) wrote Marvels of the Seven Climes to the End of Habitation describing
and illustrating a rectangular grid of latitude and longitude to produce a world map.[45][46]
 Al-Balkhi (850–934) founded the "Balkhī school" of terrestrial mapping in Baghdad.
 Al-Istakhri (died 957) compiled the Book of the Routes of States, (Kitab Masalik al-Mamalik) from personal
observations and literary sources
 Al-Biruni (973–1052) described polar equi-azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere.
 Abu Nasr Mansur (960–1036) known for his work with the spherical sine law. Wrote Book of
Azimuths which is no longer extant.
 Avicenna (980–1037) wrote on earth sciences in his Book of Healing.
 Ibn al-Faqih (10th century) wrote Concise Book of Lands (Mukhtasar Kitab al-Buldan).
 Ibn Rustah (10th century) wrote a geographical compendium known as Book of Precious Records.
Further details about some of these are given below:
In the early 10th century, Abū Zayd al-Balkhī, a Persian originally from Balkh, founded the "Balkhī school" of
terrestrial mapping in Baghdad. The geographers of this school also wrote extensively of the peoples,
products, and customs of areas in the Muslim world, with little interest in the non-Muslim realms.[47] Suhrāb, a
late 10th-century Persian geographer, accompanied a book of geographical coordinates with instructions for
making a rectangular world map, with equirectangular projection or cylindrical equidistant projection.[47] In the
early 11th century, Avicenna hypothesized on the geological causes of mountains in The Book of
Healing (1027).

The Tabula Rogeriana, drawn by Al-Idrisi for Roger II of Sicily in 1154. Note that in the original map, the north
is at the bottom and south at the top, in contrast to modern cartographicconventions.

In mathematical geography, Persian Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī, around 1025, was the first to describe a polar equi-
azimuthal equidistant projection of the celestial sphere.[48] He was also regarded as the most skilled when it
came to mapping cities and measuring the distances between them, which he did for many cities in the Middle
East and western Indian subcontinent. He combined astronomical readings and mathematical equations to
record degrees of latitude and longitude and to measure the heights of mountains and depths of valleys,
recorded in The Chronology of the Ancient Nations. He discussed human geography and the planetary
habitability of the Earth, suggesting that roughly a quarter of the Earth's surface is habitable by humans. He
solved a complex geodesic equation in order to accurately compute the Earth's circumference.[49] His estimate
of 6,339.9 km for the Earth radius was only 16.8 km less than the modern value of 6,356.7 km.
By the early 12th century the Normans had overthrown the Arabs in Sicily. Palermo had become a crossroads
for travelers and traders from many nations and the Norman King Roger II, having great interest in geography,
commissioned the creation of a book and map that would compile all this wealth of geographical information.
Researchers were sent out and the collection of data took 15 years.[50] Al-Idrisi, one of few Arabs who had ever
been to France and England as well as Spain, Central Asia and Constantinople, was employed to create the
book from this mass of data. Utilizing the information inherited from the classical geographers, he created one
of the most accurate maps of the world to date, the Tabula Rogeriana (1154). The map, written in Arabic,
shows the Eurasian continent in its entirety and the northern part of Africa.
An adherent of environmental determinism was the medieval Afro-Arab writer al-Jahiz (776–869), who
explained how the environment can determine the physical characteristics of the inhabitants of a certain
community. He used his early theory of evolution to explain the origins of different human skin colors,
particularly black skin, which he believed to be the result of the environment. He cited a stony region of
black basalt in the northern Najd as evidence for his theory.[51]
Medieval Europe[edit]
Fictional portrait of Marco Polo.

See also: Exploration of Asia

During the Early Middle Ages, geographical knowledge in Europe regressed (though it is a popular
misconception that they thought the world was flat), and the simple T and O map became the standard
depiction of the world.
The trips of Venetian explorer Marco Polo throughout Mongol Empire in the 13th century, the
Christian Crusades of the 12th and 13th centuries, and the Portuguese and Spanish voyages of exploration
during the 15th and 16th centuries opened up new horizons and stimulated geographic writings.
The Mongols also had wide-ranging knowledge of the geography of Europe and Asia, based in their
governance and ruling of much of this area and used this information for the undertaking of large military
expeditions. The evidence for this is found in historical resources such as The Secret History of Mongols and
other Persian chronicles written in 13th and 14th centuries. For example, during the rule of the Great Yuan
Dynasty a world map was created and is currently kept in South Korea. See also: Maps of the Yuan Dynasty
During the 15th century, Henry the Navigator of Portugal supported explorations of the African coast and
became a leader in the promotion of geographic studies. Among the most notable accounts of voyages and
discoveries published during the 16th century were those by Giambattista Ramusio in Venice, by Richard
Hakluyt in England, and by Theodore de Bry in what is now Belgium.

Early modern period[edit]

See also: Age of Discovery

Tabula Hungariae, Ingolstadt, 1528 - the earliest surviving printed map of the Kingdom of Hungary.
Universalis Cosmographia, the Waldseemüller wall map dated 1507, depicts
the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean separating Asia from the Americas.

Following the journeys of Marco Polo, interest in geography spread throughout Europe. From around c. 1400,
the writings of Ptolemy and his successors provided a systematic framework to tie together and portray
geographical information. This framework was used by academics for centuries to come, the positives being
the lead-up to the geographical enlightenment, however, women and indigenous writings were largely
excluded from the discourse. The European global conquests started in the early 15th century with the first
Portuguese expeditions to Africa and India, as well as the conquest of America by Spain in 1492 and continued
with a series of European naval expeditions across the Atlantic and later the Pacific and Russian expeditions to
Siberia until the 18th century. European overseas expansion led to the rise of colonial empires, with the
contact between the "Old" and "New World"s producing the Columbian Exchange: a wide transfer of plants,
animals, foods, human populations (including slaves), communicable diseases and culture between the
continents. These colonialist endeavours in 16th and 17th centuries revived a desire for both "accurate"
geographic detail, and more solid theoretical foundations. The Geographia Generalis by Bernhardus
Vareniusand Gerardus Mercator's world map are prime examples of the new breed of scientific geography.
The Waldseemüller map Universalis Cosmographia, created by German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller in
April 1507, is the first map of the Americas in which the name "America" is mentioned. Before this, the Native
Americans referred to their land depending on their location, with one of the more commonly used terms being
"Abya Yala", meaning "land of vital blood". These indigenous geographical discourses were largely ignored or
appropriated by the European colonialists to make way for European thought.
The Eurocentric map was patterned after a modification of Ptolemy's second projection but expanded to
include the Americas.[52] The Waldseemuller Map has been called "America's birth
certificate"[53] Waldseemüller also created printed maps called globe gores, that could be cut out and glued to
spheres resulting in a globe.
This has been debated widely as being dismissive of the extensive Native American history that predated the
16th-century invasion, in the sense that the implication of a "birth certificate" implies a blank history prior.
16th~18th centuries in the West[edit]
Geography as a science experiences excitement and exerts influence during the Scientific
Revolution and Religion Reformation. In the Victorian period, the oversea exploration gave it institutional
identity and geography was "the science of imperialism par excellence." Imperialism is a crucial concept for the
Europeans, as the institution become involved in geographical exploration and colonial project. Authority was
questioned, and utility gained its importance. In the era of Enlightenment, geography generated knowledge and
made it intellectually and practically possible as a university discipline. The natural theology required
geography to investigate the world as a grand machine from the Divine. Scientific voyages and travels
constructed geopolitical power from geographical knowledge, partly sponsored by Royal Society. John
Pinkerton appraised the eighteenth century had "the gigantic progress of every science, and in particular of
geographical information" and "alteration has taken place in states and boundaries."
The discourse of geographical history gave way to many new thoughts and theories, but the hegemony of the
European male academia led to the exclusion of non-western theories, observations and knowledges. One
such example is the interaction between humans and nature, with Marxist thought critiquing nature as a
commodity within Capitalism, European thought seeing nature as either a romanticised or objective concept
differing to human society, and Native American discourse, which saw nature and humans as within one
category. The implied hierarchy of knowledge that perpetuated throughout these institutions has only been
recently challenged, with the Royal Geographical Society enabling women to join as members in the 20th
century.
After English Civil War, Samuel Hartlib and his Baconian community promoted scientific application, which
showed the popularity of utility. For William Petty, the administrators should be "skilled in the best rules of
judicial astrology" to "calculate the events of diseases and prognosticate the weather." Institutionally, Gresham
Collegepropagated scientific advancement to a larger audience like tradesmen, and later this institute grew into
Royal Society. William Cuningham illustrated the utilitarian function of cosmography by the military implement
of maps. John Dee used mathematics to study location—his primary interest in geography and encouraged
exploiting resource with findings collected during voyages. Religion Reformation stimulated geographical
exploration and investigation. Philipp Melanchthon shifted geographical knowledge production from "pages of
scripture" to "experience in the world." Bartholomäus Keckermannseparated geography from theology because
the "general workings of providence" required empirical investigation. His follower, Bernhardus Varenius made
geography a science in the 17th century and published Geographia Generalis, which was used in Newton's
teaching of geography at Cambridge.
Science develops along with empiricism. Empiricism gains its central place while reflection on it also grew.
Practitioners of magic and astrology first embraced and expanded geographical knowledge. Reformation
Theology focused more on the providence than the creation as previously. Realistic experience, instead of
translated from scripture, emerged as a scientific procedure. Geographical knowledge and method play roles in
economic education and administrative application, as part of the Puritan social program. Foreign travels
provided content for geographic research and formed theories, such as environmentalism. Visual
representation, map-making or cartography, showed its practical, theoretical, and artistic value.
The concepts of "Space" and "Place" attract attention in geography. Why things are there and not elsewhere is
an important topic in Geography, together with debates on space and place. Such insights could date back in
16th and 17th centuries, identified by M. Curry as "Natural Space", "Absolute Space", "Relational Space" (On
Space and Spatial Practice). After Descartes's Principles of Philosophy, Locke and Leibniz considered space
as relative, which has long-term influence on the modern view of space. For Descartes, Grassendi and
Newton, place is a portion of "absolution space", which are neural and given. However, according to John
Locke, "Our Idea of Place is nothing else, but such a relative Position of any thing" (in An Essay Concerning
Human Understanding). "Distance" is the pivot modification of space, because "Space considered barely in
length between any two Beings, without considering any thing else between them". Also, the place is "made by
Men, for their common use, that by it they might be able to design the particular Position of Things". In the Fifth
Paper in Reply to Clarke, Leibniz stated: "Men fancy places, traces, and space, though these things consist
only in the truth of relations and not at all in any absolute reality". Space, as an "order of coexistence", "can
only be an ideal thing, containing a certain order, wherein the mind conceives the application of relation".
Leibniz moved further for the term "distance" as he discussed it together with "interval" and "situation", not just
a measurable character. Leibniz bridged place and space to quality and quantity, by saying "Quantity or
magnitude is that in things which can be known only through their simultaneous compresence--or by their
simultaneous perception... Quality, on the other hand, is what can be known in things when they are observed
singly, without requiring any compresence." In Modern Space as Relative, place and what is in place are
integrated. "The Supremacy of Space" is observed by E. Casey when the place is resolved as "position and
even point" by Leibniz's rationalism and Locke's empiricism.
During Enlightenment, advancements in science mean widening human knowledge and enable further
exploiting nature, along with industrialization and empire expansion in Europe. David Hume, "the real father of
positivist philosophy" according to Leszek Kolakowski, implied the "doctrine of facts", emphasizing the
importance of scientific observations. The "fact" is related with sensationalism that object cannot be isolated
from its "sense-perceptions", an opinion of Berkeley. Galileo, Descartes, later Hobbesand Newton advocated
scientific materialism, viewing the universe—the entire world and even human mind—as a machine. The
mechanist world view is also found in the work of Adam Smith based on historical and statistics methods. In
chemistry, Antoine Lavoisier proposed the "exact science model" and stressed quantitative methods from
experiment and mathematics. Karl Linnaeus classified plants and organisms based on an assumption of fixed
species. Later, the idea of evolution emerged not only for species but also for society and human intellect.
In General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, Kant laid out his hypothesis of cosmic evolution, and
made him "the great founder of the modern scientific conception of Evolution" according to Hastie.
Francis Bacon and his followers believed progress of science and technology drive betterment of man. This
belief was attached by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who defended human emotions and morals. His discussion on
geography education piloted local regional studies. Leibniz and Kant formed the major challenge to the
mechanical materialism. Leibniz conceptualized the world as a changing whole, rather than "sum of its parts"
as a machine. Nevertheless, he acknowledged experience requires rational interpretation—the power of
human reason.
Kant tried to reconcile the division of sense and reason by stressing moral rationalism grounded on aesthetic
experience of nature as "order, harmony, and unity". For knowledge, Kant
distinguished phenomena (sensible world) and noumena (intelligible world), and he asserted "all phenomena
are perceived in the relations of space and time." Drawing a line between "rational science" and "empirical
science", Kant regarded Physical geography—associating with space—as natural science. During his tenure
in Königsberg, Kant offered lectures on physical geography since 1756 and published the lecture
notes Physische Geographie in 1801. However, Kant's involvement in travel and geographical research is fairly
limited. Kant's work on empirical and rational science influence Humboldt and at smaller extent Ritter. Manfred
Büttner asserted that is "Kantian emancipation of geography from theology."
Humboldt is admired as a great geographer, according to D. Livingstone that "modern geography was first and
last a synthesizing science and as such, if Goetzmann is to be believed, 'it became the key scientific activity of
the age'." Humboldt met the geographer George Forster at the University of Göttingen, whose geographical
description and scientific writing influenced Humboldt. His Geognosia including the geography of rocks,
animals, and plants is "an important model for modern geography". As the Prussian Ministry of Mines,
Humboldt founded the Free Royal Mining School at Steben for miners, later regarded the prototype of such
institutes. German Naturphilosophie, especially the work of Goethe and Herder, stimulated Humboldt's idea
and research of a universal science. In his letter, he made observations while his "attention will never lose
sight of the harmony of concurrent forces, the influence of the inanimate world on the animal and vegetable
kingdom." His American travel stressed the geography of plants as his focus of science. Meanwhile, Humboldt
used empirical method to study the indigenous people in the New World, regarded as a most important work in
human geography. In Relation historique du Voyage, Humboldt called these research a new science Physique
du monde, Theorie de la Terre, or Geographie physique. During 1825 to 1859, Humboldt devoted in Kosmos,
which is about the knowledge of nature. There are growing works about the New World since then. In the
Jeffersonian era, "American geography was born of the geography of America", meaning the knowledge
discovery helped form the discipline. Practical knowledge and national pride are main components of the
Teleological tradition.
Institutions such as the Royal Geographical Society indicate geography as an independent discipline. Mary
Somerville's Physical Geography was the "conceptual culmination of ... Baconian ideal of universal
integration". According to Francis Bacon, "No natural phenomenon can be adequately studied by itself alone --
but, to be understood, it must be considered as it stands connected with all nature."

19th century[edit]

Alexander von Humboldt(1769 – 1859).

By the 18th century, geography had become recognized as a discrete discipline and became part of a
typical university curriculum in Europe (especially Paris and Berlin), although not in the United Kingdom where
geography was generally taught as a sub-discipline of other subjects.
A holistic view of geography and nature can be seen in the work by the 19th-century polymath Alexander von
Humboldt.[54] One of the great works of this time was Humboldt's Kosmos: a sketch of a physical description of
the Universe, the first volume of which was published in German in 1845. Such was the power of this work that
Dr Mary Somerville, of Cambridge University intended to scrap publication of her own Physical Geography on
reading Kosmos. Von Humboldt himself persuaded her to publish (after the publisher sent him a copy).
In 1877, Thomas Henry Huxley published his Physiography with the philosophy of universality presented as an
integrated approach in the study of the natural environment. The philosophy of universality in geography was
not a new one but can be seen as evolving from the works of Alexander von Humboldt and Immanuel Kant.
The publication of Huxley physiography presented a new form of geography that analysed and classified cause
and effect at the micro-level and then applied these to the macro-scale (due to the view that the micro was part
of the macro and thus an understanding of all the micro-scales was need to understand the macro level). This
approach emphasized the empirical collection of data over the theoretical. The same approach was also used
by Halford John Mackinder in 1887. However, the integration of
the Geosphere, Atmosphere and Biosphere under physiography was soon over taken by Davisian
geomorphology.
Over the past two centuries the quantity of knowledge and the number of tools has exploded. There are strong
links between geography and the sciences of geology and botany, as well
as economics, sociology and demographics.
The Royal Geographical Society was founded in England in 1830, although the United Kingdom did not get its
first full Chair of geography until 1917. The first real geographical intellect to emerge in United Kingdom
geography was Halford John Mackinder, appointed reader at Oxford University in 1887.
The National Geographic Society was founded in the United States in 1888 and began publication of
the National Geographic magazine which became and continues to be a great popularizer of geographic
information. The society has long supported geographic research and education.

20th century[edit]
In the West during the second half of the 19th and the 20th century, the discipline of geography went through
four major phases: environmental determinism, regional geography, the quantitative revolution, and critical
geography.
Environmental determinism[edit]
Main article: Environmental determinism
Environmental determinism is the theory that a people's physical, mental and moral habits are directly due to
the influence of their natural environment. Prominent environmental determinists included Carl Ritter, Ellen
Churchill Semple, and Ellsworth Huntington. Popular hypotheses[by whom?] included "heat makes inhabitants of
the tropics lazy" and "frequent changes in barometric pressure make inhabitants of temperate latitudes more
intellectually agile."[citation needed] Environmental determinist geographers attempted to make the study of such
influences scientific. Around the 1930s, this school of thought was widely repudiated as lacking any basis and
being prone to (often bigoted) generalizations.[citation needed] Environmental determinism remains an
embarrassment to many contemporary geographers, and leads to skepticism among many of them of claims of
environmental influence on culture (such as the theories of Jared Diamond).[citation needed]
Regional geography[edit]
Main article: Regional geography
Regional geography was coined by a group of geographers known as possibilists and represented a
reaffirmation that the proper topic of geography was study of places (regions). Regional geographers focused
on the collection of descriptive information about places, as well as the proper methods for dividing the earth
up into regions. Well-known names from these period are Alfred Hettner in Germany and Paul Vidal de la
Blache in France. The philosophical basis of this field in United States was laid out by Richard Hartshorne, who
defined geography as a study of areal differentiation, which later led to criticism of this approach as overly
descriptive and unscientific.
However, the concept of a Regional geography model focused on Area Studies has remained incredibly
popular amongst students of geography, while less so amongst scholars who are proponents of Critical
Geography and reject a Regional geography paradigm. It can be argued that Regional Geography, which
during its heyday in the 1970s through early 1990s made substantive contributions to students' and readers'
understanding of foreign cultures and the real world effects of the delineation of borders, is due for a revival in
academia as well as in popular nonfiction.
The quantitative revolution[edit]
Main article: Quantitative revolution
The quantitative revolution in geography began in the 1950s. Geographers formulated geographical theories
and subjected the theories to empirical tests, usually using statistical methods (especially hypothesis testing).
This quantitative revolution laid the groundwork for the development of geographic information systems.[citation
needed]
Well-known geographers from this period are Fred K. Schaefer, Waldo Tobler, William Garrison, Peter
Haggett, Richard J. Chorley, William Bunge, Edward Augustus Ackerman and Torsten Hägerstrand.
Critical geography[edit]
Main article: Critical geography
Though positivist approaches remain important in geography, critical geography arose as a critique of
positivism. The first strain of critical geography to emerge was humanistic geography. Drawing on the
philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology, humanistic geographers (such as Yi-Fu Tuan) focused on
people's sense of, and relationship with, places. More influential was Marxist geography, which applied the
social theories of Karl Marx and his followers to geographic phenomena. David Harveyand Richard Peet are
well-known Marxist geographers. Feminist geography is, as the name suggests, the use of ideas
from feminism in geographic contexts. The most recent strain of critical geography is postmodernist
geography, which employs the ideas of postmodernist and poststructuralist theorists to explore the social
construction of spatial relations.

The Six Essential Elements of Geography

The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes geography as “a science that deals with the description, distribution, and
interaction of the diverse physical, biological, and cultural features of the earth’s surface. Simply put, we will learn about
the features of the earth and how living things interact and change the earth. Scholars have divided the study of
geography into six parts called “The Six Essential Elements of Geography.” A geographically informed person knows:
1. The World in Spatial Terms
a. How to use maps and other geographic representations, tools, and technologies to acquire, process, and report
information from a spatial perspective
b. How to use mental maps to organize information about people, places, and environments in a spatial context
c. How to analyze the spatial organization of people, places, and environments on earth’s surface
2. Places and Regions
a. The physical and human characteristics of places
b. That people create regions to interpret earth’s complexity
c. How culture and experience influence people’s perceptions of places and regions
3. Physical Systems
a. The physical processes that shape the patterns of earth’s surface
b. The characteristics and spatial distribution of ecosystems on earth’s surface
4. Human Systems
a. The characteristics, distribution, and migration of human populations on earth’s surface
b. The characteristics, distribution, and complexity of earth’s cultural mosaics
c. The patterns and networks of economic interdependence on earth’s surface
d. The processes, patterns, and functions of human settlement
e. How the forces of cooperation and conflict among people influence the division and control of earth’s surface
5. Environment and Society
a. How human actions modify the physical environment
b. How physical systems affect human systems
c. The changes that occur in the meaning, use, distribution, and importance of resources
6. The Uses of Geography
a. How to apply geography to interpret the past
b. How to apply geography to interpret the present and plan for the future

Solar System

Solar System

The Sun and planets of the Solar System

(distances not to scale)

Age 4.568 billion years

 Local Interstellar Cloud, Local Bubble,

Location
 Orion–Cygnus Arm, Milky Way
System mass 1.0014 Solar masses
Nearest star  Proxima Centauri (4.25 ly)
 Alpha Centauri (4.37 ly)
Nearest knownplanetary Proxima Centauri system (4.25 ly)
system

Planetary system
Semi-major axis of 30.10 AU (4.503 billion km)
outer known planet (Neptune)
Distance to Kuiper cliff 50 AU

Populations
Stars 1 (Sun)
Known planets  8 (Mercury
 Venus
 Earth
 Mars

Jupiter
 Saturn
 Uranus
 Neptune)
Known dwarf planets Possibly several hundred;[1]
five currently recognized by the IAU
 (Ceres
 Pluto
 Haumea
 Makemake
 Eris)
Known natural satellites 525
 (185 planetary[2]
 347 minor planetary[3])
Known minor planets 778,897 (as of 2018-06-21)[4]
Known comets 4,017 (as of 2018-06-21)[4]
Identified rounded satellites 19

Orbit about Galactic Center

Invariable-to-galactic 60.19° (ecliptic)
plane inclination
Distance to Galactic Center 27,000 ± 1,000 ly
Orbital speed 220 km/s
Orbital period 225–250 Myr

Star-related properties
Spectral type G2V
Frost line ≈5 AU[5]
Distance to heliopause ≈120 AU
Hill sphere radius ≈1–3 ly

Solar System
 Objects

 by orbit
 by size
 by discovery date

Lists
 Gravitationally-rounded
(equilibrium) objects
 Possible dwarf planets
 Moons (natural satellites)
 Minor planets
 Comets
 Asteroids

Planets
 Mercury
 Venus
 Earth
 Mars
 Jupiter
 Saturn
 Uranus
 Neptune

The Solar System[a] is the gravitationally bound system of the planets and the Sun plus other objects that orbit
it, either directly or indirectly.[b] Of the objects that orbit the Sun directly, the largest eight are the planets,[c] with
the remainder being smaller objects, such as dwarf planets and small Solar System bodies. Of the objects that
orbit the Sun indirectly, the moons, two are larger than the smallest planet, Mercury.[d]
The Solar System formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular
cloud. The vast majority of the system's mass is in the Sun, with the majority of the remaining mass contained
in Jupiter. The four smaller inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, are terrestrial planets, being
primarily composed of rock and metal. The four outer planets are giant planets, being substantially more
massive than the terrestrials. The two largest, Jupiter and Saturn, are gas giants, being composed mainly
of hydrogen and helium; the two outermost planets, Uranus and Neptune, are ice giants, being composed
mostly of substances with relatively high melting points compared with hydrogen and helium, called volatiles,
such as water, ammonia and methane. All eight planets have almost circular orbits that lie within a nearly flat
disc called the ecliptic.
The Solar System also contains smaller objects.[e] The asteroid belt, which lies between the orbits of Mars and
Jupiter, mostly contains objects composed, like the terrestrial planets, of rock and metal. Beyond Neptune's
orbit lie the Kuiper belt and scattered disc, which are populations of trans-Neptunian objects composed mostly
of ices, and beyond them a newly discovered population of sednoids. Within these populations are several
dozen to possibly tens of thousands of objects large enough that they have been rounded by their own
gravity.[10] Such objects are categorized as dwarf planets. Identified dwarf planets include the
asteroid Ceresand the trans-Neptunian objects Pluto and Eris.[e] In addition to these two regions, various other
small-body populations, including comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust clouds, freely travel between
regions. Six of the planets, at least four of the dwarf planets, and many of the smaller bodies are orbited
by natural satellites,[f] usually termed "moons" after the Moon. Each of the outer planets is encircled
by planetary rings of dust and other small objects.
The solar wind, a stream of charged particles flowing outwards from the Sun, creates a bubble-like region in
the interstellar medium known as the heliosphere. The heliopause is the point at which pressure from the solar
wind is equal to the opposing pressure of the interstellar medium; it extends out to the edge of the scattered
disc. The Oort cloud, which is thought to be the source for long-period comets, may also exist at a distance
roughly a thousand times further than the heliosphere. The Solar System is located in the Orion Arm, 26,000
light-years from the center of the Milky Way.

Discovery and exploration

Main article: Discovery and exploration of the Solar System

Andreas Cellarius's illustration of the Copernican system, from the Harmonia Macrocosmica (1660)

For most of history, humanity did not recognize or understand the concept of the Solar System. Most people up
to the Late Middle Ages–Renaissance believed Earth to be stationary at the centre of the universe and
categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved through the sky. Although
the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had speculated on a heliocentric reordering of the
cosmos, Nicolaus Copernicus was the first to develop a mathematically predictive heliocentric system.[11][12] In
the 17th century, Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton developed an understanding
of physics that led to the gradual acceptance of the idea that Earth moves around the Sun and that the planets
are governed by the same physical laws that govern Earth. The invention of the telescope led to the discovery
of further planets and moons. Improvements in the telescope and the use of unmanned spacecraft have
enabled the investigation of geological phenomena, such as mountains, craters, seasonal meteorological
phenomena, such as clouds, dust storms and ice caps on the other planets.

Structure and composition

Comprehensive overview of the Solar System. The Sun, planets, dwarf planets and moons are at scale for
their relative sizes, not for distances. A separate distance scale is at the bottom. Moons are listed near their
planets by proximity of their orbits; only the largest moons are shown.
The principal component of the Solar System is the Sun, a G2 main-sequence star that contains 99.86% of the
system's known mass and dominates it gravitationally.[13]The Sun's four largest orbiting bodies, the giant
planets, account for 99% of the remaining mass, with Jupiter and Saturn together comprising more than 90%.
The remaining objects of the Solar System (including the four terrestrial planets, the dwarf
planets, moons, asteroids, and comets) together comprise less than 0.002% of the Solar System's total
mass.[g]
Most large objects in orbit around the Sun lie near the plane of Earth's orbit, known as the ecliptic. The planets
are very close to the ecliptic, whereas comets and Kuiper belt objects are frequently at significantly greater
angles to it.[17][18] All the planets, and most other objects, orbit the Sun in the same direction that the Sun is
rotating (counter-clockwise, as viewed from above Earth's north pole).[19] There are exceptions, such
as Halley's Comet.
The overall structure of the charted regions of the Solar System consists of the Sun, four relatively small inner
planets surrounded by a belt of mostly rocky asteroids, and four giant planets surrounded by the Kuiper belt of
mostly icy objects. Astronomers sometimes informally divide this structure into separate regions. The inner
Solar System includes the four terrestrial planets and the asteroid belt. The outer Solar System is beyond the
asteroids, including the four giant planets.[20] Since the discovery of the Kuiper belt, the outermost parts of the
Solar System are considered a distinct region consisting of the objects beyond Neptune.[21]
Most of the planets in the Solar System have secondary systems of their own, being orbited by planetary
objects called natural satellites, or moons (two of which, Titan and Ganymede, are larger than the
planet Mercury), and, in the case of the four giant planets, by planetary rings, thin bands of tiny particles that
orbit them in unison. Most of the largest natural satellites are in synchronous rotation, with one face
permanently turned toward their parent.
All planets of the Solar System lie very close to the ecliptic. The closer they are to the Sun, the faster they
travel (inner planets on the left, all planets except Neptune on the right).

Kepler's laws of planetary motion describe the orbits of objects about the Sun. Following Kepler's laws, each
object travels along an ellipse with the Sun at one focus. Objects closer to the Sun (with smaller semi-major
axes) travel more quickly because they are more affected by the Sun's gravity. On an elliptical orbit, a body's
distance from the Sun varies over the course of its year. A body's closest approach to the Sun is called
its perihelion, whereas its most distant point from the Sun is called its aphelion. The orbits of the planets are
nearly circular, but many comets, asteroids, and Kuiper belt objects follow highly elliptical orbits. The positions
of the bodies in the Solar System can be predicted using numerical models.
Although the Sun dominates the system by mass, it accounts for only about 2% of the angular
momentum.[22][23] The planets, dominated by Jupiter, account for most of the rest of the angular momentum due
to the combination of their mass, orbit, and distance from the Sun, with a possibly significant contribution from
comets.[22]
The Sun, which comprises nearly all the matter in the Solar System, is composed of roughly 98% hydrogen
and helium.[24] Jupiter and Saturn, which comprise nearly all the remaining matter, are also primarily composed
of hydrogen and helium.[25][26] A composition gradient exists in the Solar System, created by heat and light
pressure from the Sun; those objects closer to the Sun, which are more affected by heat and light pressure,
are composed of elements with high melting points. Objects farther from the Sun are composed largely of
materials with lower melting points.[27] The boundary in the Solar System beyond which those volatile
substances could condense is known as the frost line, and it lies at roughly 5 AU from the Sun.[5]
The objects of the inner Solar System are composed mostly of rock,[28] the collective name for compounds with
high melting points, such as silicates, iron or nickel, that remained solid under almost all conditions in
the protoplanetary nebula.[29] Jupiter and Saturn are composed mainly of gases, the astronomical term for
materials with extremely low melting points and high vapour pressure, such as hydrogen, helium, and neon,
which were always in the gaseous phase in the nebula.[29] Ices, like water, methane, ammonia, hydrogen
sulfide, and carbon dioxide,[28] have melting points up to a few hundred kelvins.[29] They can be found as ices,
liquids, or gases in various places in the Solar System, whereas in the nebula they were either in the solid or
gaseous phase.[29] Icy substances comprise the majority of the satellites of the giant planets, as well as most of
Uranus and Neptune (the so-called "ice giants") and the numerous small objects that lie beyond Neptune's
orbit.[28][30] Together, gases and ices are referred to as volatiles.[31]
Distances and scales
The distance from Earth to the Sun is 1 astronomical unit [AU] (150,000,000 km; 93,000,000 mi). For
comparison, the radius of the Sun is 0.0047 AU (700,000 km). Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (10−5 %) of
the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly one millionth
(10−6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 astronomical units (780,000,000 km) from the Sun and
has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU (4.5×109 km)
from the Sun.
With a few exceptions, the farther a planet or belt is from the Sun, the larger the distance between its orbit and
the orbit of the next nearer object to the Sun. For example, Venus is approximately 0.33 AU farther out from
the Sun than Mercury, whereas Saturn is 4.3 AU out from Jupiter, and Neptune lies 10.5 AU out from Uranus.
Attempts have been made to determine a relationship between these orbital distances (for example, the Titius–
Bode law),[32] but no such theory has been accepted. The images at the beginning of this section show the
orbits of the various constituents of the Solar System on different scales.
Some Solar System models attempt to convey the relative scales involved in the Solar System on human
terms. Some are small in scale (and may be mechanical—called orreries)—whereas others extend across
cities or regional areas.[33] The largest such scale model, the Sweden Solar System, uses the 110-metre
(361 ft) Ericsson Globein Stockholm as its substitute Sun, and, following the scale, Jupiter is a 7.5-metre (25-
foot) sphere at Arlanda International Airport, 40 km (25 mi) away, whereas the farthest current object, Sedna,
is a 10 cm (4 in) sphere in Luleå, 912 km (567 mi) away.[34][35]
If the Sun–Neptune distance is scaled to 100 metres, then the Sun would be about 3 cm in diameter (roughly
two-thirds the diameter of a golf ball), the giant planets would be all smaller than about 3 mm, and Earth's
diameter along with that of the other terrestrial planets would be smaller than a flea (0.3 mm) at this scale.[36]

The Solar System. Distances are to scale, objects are not.

Distances of selected bodies of the Solar System from the Sun. The left and right edges of each bar
correspond to the perihelion and aphelion of the body, respectively, hence long bars denote high orbital
eccentricity. The radius of the Sun is 0.7 million km, and the radius of Jupiter (the largest planet) is 0.07 million
km, both too small to resolve on this image.
Formation and evolution
Main article: Formation and evolution of the Solar System
The Solar System formed 4.568 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a region within a
large molecular cloud.[h] This initial cloud was likely several light-years across and probably birthed several
stars.[38] As is typical of molecular clouds, this one consisted mostly of hydrogen, with some helium, and small
amounts of heavier elements fused by previous generations of stars. As the region that would become the
Solar System, known as the pre-solar nebula,[39] collapsed, conservation of angular momentum caused it to
rotate faster. The centre, where most of the mass collected, became increasingly hotter than the surrounding
disc.[38] As the contracting nebula rotated faster, it began to flatten into a protoplanetary disc with a diameter of
roughly 200 AU[38] and a hot, dense protostar at the centre.[40][41] The planets formed by accretion from this
disc,[42] in which dust and gas gravitationally attracted each other, coalescing to form ever larger bodies.
Hundreds of protoplanets may have existed in the early Solar System, but they either merged or were
destroyed, leaving the planets, dwarf planets, and leftover minor bodies.

Artist's concept of the early Solar System

Due to their higher boiling points, only metals and silicates could exist in solid form in the warm inner Solar
System close to the Sun, and these would eventually form the rocky planets of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and
Mars. Because metallic elements only comprised a very small fraction of the solar nebula, the terrestrial
planets could not grow very large. The giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune) formed further out,
beyond the frost line, the point between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter where material is cool enough for volatile
icy compounds to remain solid. The ices that formed these planets were more plentiful than the metals and
silicates that formed the terrestrial inner planets, allowing them to grow massive enough to capture large
atmospheres of hydrogen and helium, the lightest and most abundant elements. Leftover debris that never
became planets congregated in regions such as the asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, and Oort cloud. The Nice
model is an explanation for the creation of these regions and how the outer planets could have formed in
different positions and migrated to their current orbits through various gravitational interactions.
Within 50 million years, the pressure and density of hydrogen in the centre of the protostar became great
enough for it to begin thermonuclear fusion.[43] The temperature, reaction rate, pressure, and density increased
until hydrostatic equilibrium was achieved: the thermal pressure equalled the force of gravity. At this point, the
Sun became a main-sequence star.[44] The main-sequence phase, from beginning to end, will last about
10 billion years for the Sun compared to around two billion years for all other phases of the Sun's pre-
remnant life combined.[45] Solar wind from the Sun created the heliosphere and swept away the remaining gas
and dust from the protoplanetary disc into interstellar space, ending the planetary formation process. The Sun
is growing brighter; early in its main-sequence life its brightness was 70% that of what it is today.[46]
The Solar System will remain roughly as we know it today until the hydrogen in the core of the Sun has been
entirely converted to helium, which will occur roughly 5 billion years from now. This will mark the end of the
Sun's main-sequence life. At this time, the core of the Sun will contract with hydrogen fusion occurring along a
shell surrounding the inert helium, and the energy output will be much greater than at present. The outer layers
of the Sun will expand to roughly 260 times its current diameter, and the Sun will become a red giant. Because
of its vastly increased surface area, the surface of the Sun will be considerably cooler (2,600 K at its coolest)
than it is on the main sequence.[45] The expanding Sun is expected to vaporize Mercury and render Earth
uninhabitable. Eventually, the core will be hot enough for helium fusion; the Sun will burn helium for a fraction
of the time it burned hydrogen in the core. The Sun is not massive enough to commence the fusion of heavier
elements, and nuclear reactions in the core will dwindle. Its outer layers will move away into space, leaving
a white dwarf, an extraordinarily dense object, half the original mass of the Sun but only the size of
Earth.[47] The ejected outer layers will form what is known as a planetary nebula, returning some of the material
that formed the Sun—but now enriched with heavier elements like carbon—to the interstellar medium.

Sun
Main article: Sun

Size comparison of the Sun and the planets

The Sun is the Solar System's star and by far its most massive component. Its large mass (332,900 Earth
masses),[48]which comprises 99.86% of all the mass in the Solar System,[49] produces temperatures and
densities in its core high enough to sustain nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium, making it a main-
sequence star.[50] This releases an enormous amount of energy, mostly radiated into space as electromagnetic
radiation peaking in visible light.[51]
The Sun is a G2-type main-sequence star. Hotter main-sequence stars are more luminous. The Sun's
temperature is intermediate between that of the hottest stars and that of the coolest stars. Stars brighter and
hotter than the Sun are rare, whereas substantially dimmer and cooler stars, known as red dwarfs, make up
85% of the stars in the Milky Way.[52][53]
The Sun is a population I star; it has a higher abundance of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium
("metals" in astronomical parlance) than the older population II stars.[54] Elements heavier than hydrogen and
helium were formed in the cores of ancient and exploding stars, so the first generation of stars had to die
before the Universe could be enriched with these atoms. The oldest stars contain few metals, whereas stars
born later have more. This high metallicity is thought to have been crucial to the Sun's development of
a planetary system because the planets form from the accretion of "metals".[55]

Interplanetary medium
Main articles: Interplanetary medium and Solar wind
The heliospheric current sheet

The vast majority of the Solar System consists of a near-vacuum known as the interplanetary medium. Along
with light, the Sun radiates a continuous stream of charged particles (a plasma) known as the solar wind. This
stream of particles spreads outwards at roughly 1.5 million kilometres per hour,[56] creating a tenuous
atmosphere that permeates the interplanetary medium out to at least 100 AU (see § Heliosphere).[57] Activity
on the Sun's surface, such as solar flaresand coronal mass ejections, disturb the heliosphere, creating space
weather and causing geomagnetic storms.[58] The largest structure within the heliosphere is the heliospheric
current sheet, a spiral form created by the actions of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the interplanetary
medium.[59][60]
Earth's magnetic field stops its atmosphere from being stripped away by the solar wind.[61] Venus and Mars do
not have magnetic fields, and as a result the solar wind is causing their atmospheres to gradually bleed away
into space.[62]Coronal mass ejections and similar events blow a magnetic field and huge quantities of material
from the surface of the Sun. The interaction of this magnetic field and material with Earth's magnetic field
funnels charged particles into Earth's upper atmosphere, where its interactions create aurorae seen near
the magnetic poles.
The heliosphere and planetary magnetic fields (for those planets that have them) partially shield the Solar
System from high-energy interstellar particles called cosmic rays. The density of cosmic rays in the interstellar
medium and the strength of the Sun's magnetic field change on very long timescales, so the level of cosmic-
ray penetration in the Solar System varies, though by how much is unknown.[63]
The interplanetary medium is home to at least two disc-like regions of cosmic dust. The first, the zodiacal dust
cloud, lies in the inner Solar System and causes the zodiacal light. It was likely formed by collisions within the
asteroid belt brought on by gravitational interactions with the planets.[64] The second dust cloud extends from
about 10 AU to about 40 AU, and was probably created by similar collisions within the Kuiper belt.[65][66]

Inner Solar System

The inner Solar System is the region comprising the terrestrial planets and the asteroid belt.[67] Composed
mainly of silicates and metals, the objects of the inner Solar System are relatively close to the Sun; the radius
of this entire region is less than the distance between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. This region is also within
the frost line, which is a little less than 5 AU (about 700 million km) from the Sun.[68]
Inner planets
Main article: Terrestrial planet
The inner planets. From left to right: Earth, Mars, Venus, and Mercury (sizes to scale).

The four terrestrial or inner planets have dense, rocky compositions, few or no moons, and no ring systems.
They are composed largely of refractory minerals, such as the silicates, which form their crusts and mantles,
and metals, such as iron and nickel, which form their cores. Three of the four inner planets (Venus, Earth and
Mars) have atmospheressubstantial enough to generate weather; all have impact craters and tectonic surface
features, such as rift valleys and volcanoes. The term inner planet should not be confused with inferior planet,
which designates those planets that are closer to the Sun than Earth is (i.e. Mercury and Venus).
Mercury
Main article: Mercury (planet)
Mercury (0.4 AU from the Sun) is the closest planet to the Sun and the smallest planet in the Solar
System (0.055 Earth masses). Mercury has no natural satellites; besides impact craters, its only known
geological features are lobed ridges or rupes that were probably produced by a period of contraction
early in its history.[69] Mercury's very tenuous atmosphere consists of atoms blasted off its surface by
the solar wind.[70] Its relatively large iron core and thin mantle have not yet been adequately explained.
Hypotheses include that its outer layers were stripped off by a giant impact; or, that it was prevented
from fully accreting by the young Sun's energy.[71][72]
Venus
Main article: Venus
Venus (0.7 AU from the Sun) is close in size to Earth (0.815 Earth masses) and, like Earth, has a thick
silicate mantle around an iron core, a substantial atmosphere, and evidence of internal geological
activity. It is much drier than Earth, and its atmosphere is ninety times as dense. Venus has no natural
satellites. It is the hottest planet, with surface temperatures over 400 °C (752 °F), most likely due to the
amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.[73] No definitive evidence of current geological activity
has been detected on Venus, but it has no magnetic field that would prevent depletion of its substantial
atmosphere, which suggests that its atmosphere is being replenished by volcanic eruptions.[74]
Earth
Main article: Earth
Earth (1 AU from the Sun) is the largest and densest of the inner planets, the only one known to have
current geological activity, and the only place where life is known to exist.[75] Its liquid hydrosphere is
unique among the terrestrial planets, and it is the only planet where plate tectonics has been observed.
Earth's atmosphere is radically different from those of the other planets, having been altered by the
presence of life to contain 21% free oxygen.[76] It has one natural satellite, the Moon, the only large
satellite of a terrestrial planet in the Solar System.
Mars
Main article: Mars
Mars (1.5 AU from the Sun) is smaller than Earth and Venus (0.107 Earth masses). It has an
atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide with a surface pressure of 6.1 millibars (roughly 0.6% of that of
Earth).[77] Its surface, peppered with vast volcanoes, such as Olympus Mons, and rift valleys, such
as Valles Marineris, shows geological activity that may have persisted until as recently as 2 million
years ago.[78] Its red colour comes from iron oxide (rust) in its soil.[79] Mars has two tiny natural satellites
(Deimos and Phobos) thought to be either captured asteroids,[80] or ejected debris from a massive
impact early in Mars's history.[81]
 Asteroid belt
Main article: Asteroid belt

The donut-shaped asteroid belt is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

Sun Asteroid belt

Jupiter Hilda asteroids
trojans NEOs (selection)
Planetary
orbit
Asteroids except for the largest, Ceres, are classified as small Solar System bodies[e] and are
composed mainly of refractory rocky and metallic minerals, with some ice.[82][83] They range
from a few metres to hundreds of kilometres in size. Asteroids smaller than one meter are
usually called meteoroids and micrometeoroids (grain-sized), depending on different,
somewhat arbitrary definitions.
The asteroid belt occupies the orbit between Mars and Jupiter, between 2.3 and 3.3 AU from
the Sun. It is thought to be remnants from the Solar System's formation that failed to coalesce
because of the gravitational interference of Jupiter.[84] The asteroid belt contains tens of
thousands, possibly millions, of objects over one kilometre in diameter.[85] Despite this, the total
mass of the asteroid belt is unlikely to be more than a thousandth of that of Earth.[16] The
asteroid belt is very sparsely populated; spacecraftroutinely pass through without incident.

Ceres
Main article: Ceres (dwarf planet)

Ceres - map of gravity fields: red is high; blue, low.

Ceres (2.77 AU) is the largest asteroid, a protoplanet, and a dwarf planet.[e] It has a diameter of slightly
under 1,000 km, and a mass large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape. Ceres
was considered a planet when it was discovered in 1801, and was reclassified to asteroid in the 1850s
as further observations revealed additional asteroids.[86] It was classified as a dwarf planet in 2006
when the definition of a planet was created.
Asteroid groups
 Asteroids in the asteroid belt are divided into asteroid groups and families based on their orbital
characteristics. Asteroid moons are asteroids that orbit larger asteroids. They are not as clearly
distinguished as planetary moons, sometimes being almost as large as their partners. The asteroid belt
also contains main-belt comets, which may have been the source of Earth's water.[87]
Jupiter trojans are located in either of Jupiter's L4 or L5 points (gravitationally stable regions leading and
trailing a planet in its orbit); the term "trojan" is also used for small bodies in any other planetary or
satellite Lagrange point. Hilda asteroids are in a 2:3 resonance with Jupiter; that is, they go around the
Sun three times for every two Jupiter orbits.[88]
The inner Solar System also contains near-Earth asteroids, many of which cross the orbits of the inner
planets.[89] Some of them are potentially hazardous objects.

Outer Solar System

The outer region of the Solar System is home to the giant planets and their large moons. The centaurs and
many short-period comets also orbit in this region. Due to their greater distance from the Sun, the solid
objects in the outer Solar System contain a higher proportion of volatiles, such as water, ammonia, and
methane than those of the inner Solar System because the lower temperatures allow these compounds to
remain solid.
Outer planets
Main articles: Outer planets and Giant planet

The outer planets (in the background) Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, compared to the inner
planets Earth, Venus, Mars and Mercury (in the foreground).

The four outer planets, or giant planets (sometimes called Jovian planets), collectively make up 99% of the
mass known to orbit the Sun.[g] Jupiter and Saturn are together more than 400 times the mass of Earth and
consist overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium; Uranus and Neptune are far less massive (<20 Earth masses
each) and are composed primarily of ices. For these reasons, some astronomers suggest they belong in their
own category, "ice giants".[90] All four giant planets have rings, although only Saturn's ring system is easily
observed from Earth. The term superior planet designates planets outside Earth's orbit and thus includes both
the outer planets and Mars.
Jupiter
Main article: Jupiter
Jupiter (5.2 AU), at 318 Earth masses, is 2.5 times the mass of all the other planets put together. It is
composed largely of hydrogen and helium. Jupiter's strong internal heat creates semi-permanent
features in its atmosphere, such as cloud bands and the Great Red Spot. Jupiter has 79 known
satellites. The four largest, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, show similarities to the terrestrial
planets, such as volcanism and internal heating.[91] Ganymede, the largest satellite in the Solar System,
is larger than Mercury.
Saturn
Main article: Saturn
Saturn (9.5 AU), distinguished by its extensive ring system, has several similarities to Jupiter, such as
its atmospheric composition and magnetosphere. Although Saturn has 60% of Jupiter's volume, it is
less than a third as massive, at 95 Earth masses. Saturn is the only planet of the Solar System that is
less dense than water.[92] The rings of Saturn are made up of small ice and rock particles. Saturn
 has 62 confirmed satellites composed largely of ice. Two of these, Titan and Enceladus, show signs of
geological activity.[93] Titan, the second-largest moon in the Solar System, is larger than Mercury and
the only satellite in the Solar System with a substantial atmosphere.
Uranus
Main article: Uranus
Uranus (19.2 AU), at 14 Earth masses, is the lightest of the outer planets. Uniquely among the planets,
it orbits the Sun on its side; its axial tilt is over ninety degrees to the ecliptic. It has a much colder core
than the other giant planets and radiates very little heat into space.[94] Uranus has 27 known satellites,
the largest ones being Titania, Oberon, Umbriel, Ariel, and Miranda.
Neptune
Main article: Neptune
Neptune (30.1 AU), though slightly smaller than Uranus, is more massive (equivalent to 17 Earths) and
hence more dense. It radiates more internal heat, but not as much as Jupiter or Saturn.[95] Neptune
has 14 known satellites. The largest, Triton, is geologically active, with geysers of liquid
nitrogen.[96] Triton is the only large satellite with a retrograde orbit. Neptune is accompanied in its orbit
by several minor planets, termed Neptune trojans, that are in 1:1 resonance with it.
Centaurs
Main article: Centaur (minor planet)
The centaurs are icy comet-like bodies whose orbits have semi-major axes greater than Jupiter's (5.5 AU) and
less than Neptune's (30 AU). The largest known centaur, 10199 Chariklo, has a diameter of about
250 km.[97] The first centaur discovered, 2060 Chiron, has also been classified as comet (95P) because it
develops a coma just as comets do when they approach the Sun.[98]

Comets

Hale–Bopp seen in 1997

Main article: Comet

Comets are small Solar System bodies,[e] typically only a few kilometres across, composed largely of volatile
ices. They have highly eccentric orbits, generally a perihelion within the orbits of the inner planets and an
aphelion far beyond Pluto. When a comet enters the inner Solar System, its proximity to the Sun causes its
icy surface to sublimate and ionise, creating a coma: a long tail of gas and dust often visible to the naked eye.
Short-period comets have orbits lasting less than two hundred years. Long-period comets have orbits lasting
thousands of years. Short-period comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper belt, whereas long-period
comets, such as Hale–Bopp, are thought to originate in the Oort cloud. Many comet groups, such as the Kreutz
Sungrazers, formed from the breakup of a single parent.[99] Some comets with hyperbolic orbits may originate
outside the Solar System, but determining their precise orbits is difficult.[100] Old comets that have had most of
their volatiles driven out by solar warming are often categorised as asteroids.[101]

Trans-Neptunian region
Beyond the orbit of Neptune lies the area of the "trans-Neptunian region", with the doughnut-shaped Kuiper
belt, home of Pluto and several other dwarf planets, and an overlapping disc of scattered objects, which
is tilted toward the plane of the Solar System and reaches much further out than the Kuiper belt. The entire
region is still largely unexplored. It appears to consist overwhelmingly of many thousands of small worlds—the
largest having a diameter only a fifth that of Earth and a mass far smaller than that of the Moon—composed
mainly of rock and ice. This region is sometimes described as the "third zone of the Solar System", enclosing
the inner and the outer Solar System.[102]
Kuiper belt

Main article: Kuiper belt

Known objects in the Kuiper belt

Sun Kuiper belt

Jupiter trojans Scattered disc
Giant planets Neptune trojans

Size comparison of some large TNOs with

Earth: Pluto and its
moons, Eris, Makemake, Haumea, Sedna, 2007
OR10, Quaoar, and Orcus.

The Kuiper belt is a great ring of debris similar to the asteroid belt, but consisting mainly of objects composed
primarily of ice.[103] It extends between 30 and 50 AU from the Sun. Though it is estimated to contain anything
from dozens to thousands of dwarf planets, it is composed mainly of small Solar System bodies. Many of the
larger Kuiper belt objects, such as Quaoar, Varuna, and Orcus, may prove to be dwarf planets with further
data. There are estimated to be over 100,000 Kuiper belt objects with a diameter greater than 50 km, but the
total mass of the Kuiper belt is thought to be only a tenth or even a hundredth the mass of Earth. [15]Many
Kuiper belt objects have multiple satellites,[104] and most have orbits that take them outside the plane of the
ecliptic.[105]
The Kuiper belt can be roughly divided into the "classical" belt and the resonances.[103] Resonances are orbits
linked to that of Neptune (e.g. twice for every three Neptune orbits, or once for every two). The first resonance
begins within the orbit of Neptune itself. The classical belt consists of objects having no resonance with
Neptune, and extends from roughly 39.4 AU to 47.7 AU.[106]Members of the classical Kuiper belt are classified
as cubewanos, after the first of their kind to be discovered, 15760 Albion (which previously had the provisional
designation 1992 QB1), and are still in near primordial, low-eccentricity orbits.[107]
Pluto and Charon
Main articles: Pluto and Charon (moon)
The dwarf planet Pluto (39 AU average) is the largest known object in the Kuiper belt. When discovered in
1930, it was considered to be the ninth planet; this changed in 2006 with the adoption of a formal definition of
planet. Pluto has a relatively eccentric orbit inclined 17 degrees to the ecliptic plane and ranging from 29.7 AU
from the Sun at perihelion (within the orbit of Neptune) to 49.5 AU at aphelion. Pluto has a 3:2 resonance with
Neptune, meaning that Pluto orbits twice round the Sun for every three Neptunian orbits. Kuiper belt objects
whose orbits share this resonance are called plutinos.[108]

Charon, the largest of Pluto's moons, is sometimes described as part of a binary system with Pluto, as the two
bodies orbit a barycentre of gravity above their surfaces (i.e. they appear to "orbit each other"). Beyond
Charon, four much smaller moons, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, orbit within the system.
Makemake and Haumea
Main articles: Makemake and Haumea
Makemake (45.79 AU average), although smaller than Pluto, is the largest known object in the classical Kuiper
belt (that is, a Kuiper belt object not in a confirmed resonance with Neptune). Makemake is the brightest object
in the Kuiper belt after Pluto. It was named and designated a dwarf planet in 2008.[7] Its orbit is far more
inclined than Pluto's, at 29°.[109]
Haumea (43.13 AU average) is in an orbit similar to Makemake except that it is in a 7:12 orbital resonance with
Neptune.[110] It is about the same size as Makemake and has two natural satellites. A rapid, 3.9-hour rotation
gives it a flattened and elongated shape. It was named and designated a dwarf planet in 2008.[111]
Scattered disc
Main article: Scattered disc
The scattered disc, which overlaps the Kuiper belt but extends much further outwards, is thought to be the
source of short-period comets. Scattered-disc objects are thought to have been ejected into erratic orbits by
the gravitational influence of Neptune's early outward migration. Most scattered disc objects (SDOs) have
perihelia within the Kuiper belt but aphelia far beyond it (some more than 150 AU from the Sun). SDOs' orbits
are also highly inclined to the ecliptic plane and are often almost perpendicular to it. Some astronomers
consider the scattered disc to be merely another region of the Kuiper belt and describe scattered disc objects
as "scattered Kuiper belt objects".[112] Some astronomers also classify centaurs as inward-scattered Kuiper belt
objects along with the outward-scattered residents of the scattered disc.[113]
Eris
Main article: Eris (dwarf planet)
Eris (68 AU average) is the largest known scattered disc object, and caused a debate about what constitutes a
planet, because it is 25% more massive than Pluto[114]and about the same diameter. It is the most massive of
the known dwarf planets. It has one known moon, Dysnomia. Like Pluto, its orbit is highly eccentric, with
a perihelion of 38.2 AU (roughly Pluto's distance from the Sun) and an aphelion of 97.6 AU, and steeply
inclined to the ecliptic plane.
 Farthest regions

From the Sun to the nearest star: The Solar System on a logarithmic scale in astronomical units (AU)

The point at which the Solar System ends and interstellar space begins is not precisely defined because its
outer boundaries are shaped by two separate forces: the solar wind and the Sun's gravity. The limit of the solar
wind's influence is roughly four times Pluto's distance from the Sun; this heliopause, the outer boundary of
the heliosphere, is considered the beginning of the interstellar medium.[57] The Sun's Hill sphere, the effective
range of its gravitational dominance, is thought to extend up to a thousand times farther and encompasses the
theorized Oort cloud.[115]
Heliosphere
Main article: Heliosphere

The bubble-like heliosphere with its various transitional regions moving through the interstellar medium

The heliosphere is a stellar-wind bubble, a region of space dominated by the Sun, which radiates at roughly
400 km/s its solar wind, a stream of charged particles, until it collides with the wind of the interstellar medium.
The collision occurs at the termination shock, which is roughly 80–100 AU from the Sun upwind of the
interstellar medium and roughly 200 AU from the Sun downwind.[116] Here the wind slows dramatically,
condenses and becomes more turbulent,[116]forming a great oval structure known as the heliosheath. This
structure is thought to look and behave very much like a comet's tail, extending outward for a further 40 AU on
the upwind side but tailing many times that distance downwind; evidence from Cassiniand Interstellar Boundary
Explorer spacecraft has suggested that it is forced into a bubble shape by the constraining action of the
interstellar magnetic field.[117]
The outer boundary of the heliosphere, the heliopause, is the point at which the solar wind finally terminates
and is the beginning of interstellar space.[57] Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are reported to have passed the
termination shock and entered the heliosheath, at 94 and 84 AU from the Sun, respectively.[118][119] Voyager 1 is
reported to have crossed the heliopause in August 2012.[120]
The shape and form of the outer edge of the heliosphere is likely affected by the fluid dynamics of interactions
with the interstellar medium as well as solar magnetic fieldsprevailing to the south, e.g. it is bluntly shaped with
the northern hemisphere extending 9 AU farther than the southern hemisphere.[116] Beyond the heliopause, at
around 230 AU, lies the bow shock, a plasma "wake" left by the Sun as it travels through the Milky Way.[121]
 Zooming out the Solar System:

 inner Solar System and Jupiter

 outer Solar System and Pluto
 orbit of Sedna (detached object)
 inner part of the Oort Cloud

Due to a lack of data, conditions in local interstellar space are not known for certain. It is expected
that NASA's Voyager spacecraft, as they pass the heliopause, will transmit valuable data on radiation levels and
solar wind to Earth.[122] How well the heliosphere shields the Solar System from cosmic rays is poorly
understood. A NASA-funded team has developed a concept of a "Vision Mission" dedicated to sending a probe
to the heliosphere.[123][124]
Detached objects
Main articles: Detached object and Sednoid
90377 Sedna (520 AU average) is a large, reddish object with a gigantic, highly elliptical orbit that takes it from
about 76 AU at perihelion to 940 AU at aphelion and takes 11,400 years to complete. Mike Brown, who
discovered the object in 2003, asserts that it cannot be part of the scattered disc or the Kuiper belt because its
perihelion is too distant to have been affected by Neptune's migration. He and other astronomers consider it to
be the first in an entirely new population, sometimes termed "distant detached objects" (DDOs), which also may
include the object 2000 CR105, which has a perihelion of 45 AU, an aphelion of 415 AU, and an orbital period of
3,420 years.[125] Brown terms this population the "inner Oort cloud" because it may have formed through a
similar process, although it is far closer to the Sun.[126] Sedna is very likely a dwarf planet, though its shape has
yet to be determined. The second unequivocally detached object, with a perihelion farther than Sedna's at
roughly 81 AU, is 2012 VP113, discovered in 2012. Its aphelion is only half that of Sedna's, at 400–500
AU.[127][128]
Oort cloud
Main article: Oort cloud

Schematic of the hypothetical Oort cloud, with a spherical outer cloud and a disc-shaped inner cloud
The Oort cloud is a hypothetical spherical cloud of up to a trillion icy objects that is thought to be the source for
all long-period comets and to surround the Solar System at roughly 50,000 AU (around 1 light-year (ly)), and
possibly to as far as 100,000 AU (1.87 ly). It is thought to be composed of comets that were ejected from the
inner Solar System by gravitational interactions with the outer planets. Oort cloud objects move very slowly, and
can be perturbed by infrequent events, such as collisions, the gravitational effects of a passing star, or
the galactic tide, the tidal force exerted by the Milky Way.[129][130]
Boundaries
See also: Vulcanoid, Planets beyond Neptune, and Planet Nine
Much of the Solar System is still unknown. The Sun's gravitational field is estimated to dominate the
gravitational forces of surrounding stars out to about two light years (125,000 AU). Lower estimates for the
radius of the Oort cloud, by contrast, do not place it farther than 50,000 AU.[131] Despite discoveries such as
Sedna, the region between the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, an area tens of thousands of AU in radius, is still
virtually unmapped. There are also ongoing studies of the region between Mercury and the Sun.[132] Objects
may yet be discovered in the Solar System's uncharted regions.
Currently, the furthest known objects, such as Comet West, have aphelia around 70,000 AU from the Sun, but
as the Oort cloud becomes better known, this may change.

Galactic context

Diagram of the Milky Way with the position of the Solar System marked by a yellow arrow

The Solar System is located in the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about 100,000 light-
years containing about 100 billion stars.[133] The Sun resides in one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known
as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.[134] The Sun lies between 25,000 and 28,000 light-years from
the Galactic Centre,[135] and its speed within the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one
revolution every 225–250 million years. This revolution is known as the Solar System's galactic
year.[136] The solar apex, the direction of the Sun's path through interstellar space, is near the
constellation Hercules in the direction of the current location of the bright star Vega.[137] The plane of the ecliptic
lies at an angle of about 60° to the galactic plane.[i]
The Solar System's location in the Milky Way is a factor in the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Its orbit is
close to circular, and orbits near the Sun are at roughly the same speed as that of the spiral
arms.[139][140] Therefore, the Sun passes through arms only rarely. Because spiral arms are home to a far larger
concentration of supernovae, gravitational instabilities, and radiation that could disrupt the Solar System, this
has given Earth long periods of stability for life to evolve.[139] The Solar System also lies well outside the star-
crowded environs of the galactic centre. Near the centre, gravitational tugs from nearby stars could perturb
bodies in the Oort cloud and send many comets into the inner Solar System, producing collisions with
potentially catastrophic implications for life on Earth. The intense radiation of the galactic centre could also
interfere with the development of complex life.[139] Even at the Solar System's current location, some scientists
have speculated that recent supernovae may have adversely affected life in the last 35,000 years, by flinging
pieces of expelled stellar core towards the Sun, as radioactive dust grains and larger, comet-like bodies.[141]
Neighbourhood

Beyond the heliosphere is the interstellar medium, consisting of various clouds of gases. The Solar System
currently moves through the Local Interstellar Cloud.

The Solar System is in the Local Interstellar Cloud or Local Fluff. It is thought to be near the neighbouring G-
Cloud but it is not known if the Solar System is embedded in the Local Interstellar Cloud, or if it is in the region
where the Local Interstellar Cloud and G-Cloud are interacting.[142][143] The Local Interstellar Cloud is an area of
denser cloud in an otherwise sparse region known as the Local Bubble, an hourglass-shaped cavity in
the interstellar medium roughly 300 light-years (ly) across. The bubble is suffused with high-temperature
plasma, that suggests it is the product of several recent supernovae.[144]
There are relatively few stars within ten light-years of the Sun. The closest is the triple star system Alpha
Centauri, which is about 4.4 light-years away. Alpha Centauri A and B are a closely tied pair of Sun-like stars,
whereas the small red dwarf, Proxima Centauri, orbits the pair at a distance of 0.2 light-year. In 2016, a
potentially habitable exoplanet was confirmed to be orbiting Proxima Centauri, called Proxima Centauri b, the
closest confirmed exoplanet to the Sun.[145] The stars next closest to the Sun are the red dwarfs Barnard's
Star (at 5.9 ly), Wolf 359 (7.8 ly), and Lalande 21185 (8.3 ly).
The largest nearby star is Sirius, a bright main-sequence star roughly 8.6 light-years away and roughly twice the
Sun's mass and that is orbited by a white dwarf, Sirius B. The nearest brown dwarfs are the binary Luhman
16 system at 6.6 light-years. Other systems within ten light-years are the binary red-dwarf system Luyten 726-
8 (8.7 ly) and the solitary red dwarf Ross 154(9.7 ly).[146] The closest solitary Sun-like star to the Solar System
is Tau Ceti at 11.9 light-years. It has roughly 80% of the Sun's mass but only 60% of its luminosity.[147] The
closest known free-floating planetary-mass object to the Sun is WISE 0855−0714,[148]an object with a mass less
than 10 Jupiter masses roughly 7 light-years away.

A diagram of Earth's location in the observable Universe. (Click here for an alternate image.)
Comparison with extrasolar systems
Compared to other planetary systems the Solar System stands out in lacking planets interior to the orbit of
Mercury.[149][150] The known Solar System also lacks super-Earths (Planet Nine could be a super-Earth beyond
the known Solar System).[149] Uncommonly, it has only small rocky planets and large gas giants; elsewhere
planets of intermediate size are typical—both rocky and gas—so there is no "gap" as seen between the size of
Earth and of Neptune (with a radius 3.8 times as large). Also, these super-Earths have closer orbits than
Mercury.[149] This led to hypothesis that all planetary systems start with many close-in planets, and that typically
a sequence of their collisions causes consolidation of mass into few larger planets, but in case of the Solar
System the collisions caused their destruction and ejection.[151][152]
The orbits of Solar System planets are nearly circular. Compared to other systems, they have smaller orbital
eccentricity.[149] Although there are attempts to explain it partly with a bias in the radial-velocity detection method
and partly with long interactions of a quite high number of planets, the exact causes remain
undetermined.[149][153]

Visual summary
This section is a sampling of Solar System bodies, selected for size and quality of imagery, and sorted by
volume. Some omitted objects are larger than the ones included here, notably Eris, because these have not
been imaged in high quality.

Solar System

Sun Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Earth Venus

(star) (planet) (planet) (planet) (planet) (planet) (planet)

Ganymede Titan Callisto Io

Mars Mercury Moon
(moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of
(planet) (planet) (moon of Earth)
Jupiter) Saturn) Jupiter) Jupiter)
 Europa Triton Pluto Titania Rhea Oberon
Iapetus
(moon of (moon of (Kuiper belt (moon of (moon of (moon of
(moon of Saturn)
Jupiter) Neptune) object) Uranus) Saturn) Uranus)

Charon Umbriel Ariel Dione Tethys

Ceres Vesta
(moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of
(belt asteroid) (belt asteroid)
Pluto) Uranus) Uranus) Saturn) Saturn)

Enceladus Miranda Proteus Mimas Hyperion Phoebe

Janus
(moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of
(moon of Saturn)
Saturn) Uranus) Neptune) Saturn) Saturn) Saturn)

Epimetheus Prometheus Pandora Helene

Lutetia Mathilde Ida
(moon of (moon of (moon of (moon of
(belt asteroid) (belt asteroid) (belt asteroid)
Saturn) Saturn) Saturn) Saturn)

Phobos Deimos
 (moon of (moon of
Mars) Mars)

Voyager 1 views the Solar System from over 6 billion km from Earth.

Venus, Earth (Pale Blue Dot), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (13 September 1996).

 Astronomical symbols
 Ephemeris is a compilation of positions of naturally occurring astronomical objects as well as artificial
satellites in the sky at a given time or times.
 HIP 11915 (a solar analog whose planets contains a Jupiter analog)
 Lists of geological features of the Solar System
 List of gravitationally rounded objects of the Solar System
 List of Solar System extremes
 Outline of the Solar System
 Planetary mnemonic
 Solar System in fiction

Notes

1. Jump up^ Capitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body
regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical
objects, but uses mixed "Solar System" and "solar system" in their naming guidelines document. The name
 is commonly rendered in lower case ("solar system"), as, for example, in the Oxford English
Dictionary and Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary.
2. Jump up^ The natural satellites (moons) orbiting the Solar System's planets are an example of the latter.
3. Jump up^ Historically, several other bodies were once considered planets, including, from its discovery in
1930 until 2006, Pluto. See Former planets.
4. Jump up^ The two moons larger than Mercury are Ganymede, which orbits Jupiter, and Titan, which
orbits Saturn. Although bigger than Mercury, both moons have less than half the mass of Mercury.
5. ^ Jump up to:a b c d e According to IAU definitions, objects orbiting the Sun are classified dynamically and
physically into three categories: planets, dwarf planets, and small Solar System bodies.