Physical geography maps air, water, life, and rock together
Natural geography asks how atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere pattern Earth's surface. Its subfields, from geomorphology to climatology, split that question into landforms, water cycles, ice, species ranges, climate averages, and soils. For most of its long history geography meant little else: until the late nineteenth century it was almost purely a natural science.
Physical geography, also called physiography or natural geography, is one of geography's three main branches. It is a natural science of the processes and patterns at work in the atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere, which sets it apart from human geography and its focus on the built environment.
Geomorphology explains how Earth's surface is shaped now and was shaped in the past, with specialties for settings such as deserts and rivers. Hydrology tracks the quantity and quality of water in rivers, lakes, aquifers, soils, and to some extent glaciers, organized around the hydrological cycle. Glaciology studies the cryosphere, calling ice sheets continental glaciers and mountain ice alpine glaciers. Biogeography, which grew out of Alfred Russel Wallace's work, maps where species live and why.
Climatology treats climate as weather averaged over long spans, at local and global scales, and weighs natural against human influences. Soil geography charts how soils vary across terrain and links geography with pedology, the study of soil formation, form, and classification. Palaeogeography reads fossils and paleomagnetism in the rock record to reconstruct where continents sat through geologic time, evidence behind continental drift, plate tectonics, and supercontinents. Quaternary science narrows the lens to the last 2.6 million years, from the last ice age to the Holocene.
From the Greek classical period until anthropogeography emerged in the late nineteenth century, geography was almost wholly a natural science: a gazetteer of the known world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the geological quarrel between James Hutton's uniformitarianism and Georges Cuvier's catastrophism spilled into the field, and colonial expansion during the Industrial Revolution helped create geography departments in European universities. In Russia, Mikhail Lomonosov, regarded as the patriarch of Russian geography, joined the Academy of Sciences' geography department in the mid-1750s to direct research in Siberia. Today, unlike human geographers, physical geographers mostly publish in interdisciplinary journals.
Source: Physical geography
