Dividing the terrestrial world into the “Global North” and the “Global South” is becoming increasingly common. Simple versions of this “two worlds” model have a relatively clean north/south division, with only Australia and New Zealand falling out of place as…

The past several GeoCurrents posts have examined the geography of the world’s wealthiest people by mapping their primary residences. As these posts showed, those with fortunes greater than $20 billion are primarily concentrated in the United States, west-central Europe, and…

When I turned to AI to answer the question in the title to this post, ChatGPT replied “Monaco,” as did Grok, while Gemini (Google) came back with “San Francisco.” Gemini, however, specified that it had surveyed only “major” cities. When…

The previous GeoCurrents post showed that most of the world’s wealthiest persons live in just a few areas, with primary concentrations in the United States, west-central Europe, and maritime East Asia, and secondary concentrations in Moscow, Dubai, and “Greater Mumbai”…

The United States is well known for its concentration of wealth at the upper end of the spectrum. A household in the United States must have a net worth of roughly 13 to 14 million US dollars to be in…

Since the fall of Syria’s Assad Regime in December 2024, I have been wondering what would become of the Druze people and the areas in which they are the majority population. Particularly important is the Jabal al-Druze, or “Mountain of…

(Note: Last December I began work on a series of posts focusing on the geography of wealth and corporate power. After a single post on the location of corporate headquarters, I had to suspend my work on this topic. This…

The desiccation of the Aral Sea is a widely reported and well-known environmental disaster. Before the late twentieth century, this so-called sea was vast lake that supported major fisheries. Over the past seventy years, most of the flow of the…

As explained in the previous GeoCurrents post, the historical region of Khwarazm, located south of the (former) Aral Sea in Central Asia, was a major intellectual hub in late-ancient and medieval times, producing two of the world’s greatest scholars, al-Biruni…

The previous GeoCurrents post featured a map of the birthplaces of ten prominent medieval scholars from greater Khorasan. As was noted, two of these thinkers, al-Biruni and al-Khwārizmī, were from Khwarazm in what is now northern Uzbekistan – as is…

The modern region of Khorasan covers three provinces in northeastern Iran: North Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, and South Khorasan. Razavi Khorasan, the name of which refers to Ali al-Rida, the eighth Imam of Twelver Shia Islam, is by far the most…

The most recent GeoCurrents posts expressed skepticism of the idea that the Persian, of Farsi-speaking, regions of Iran are more economically developed than the non-Persian regions. As I showed, several non-Persian regions have relatively high per capita income and production.…

The previous post argued that the “Persian” (or Farsi-speaking) provinces of Iran are not necessarily more prosperous and economically developed than the “non-Persian” provinces, focusing on the relatively affluent but non-Farsi-speaking Caspian region, particularly Mazandaran province. The Azeri-speaking (or Azerbaijani-speaking)…

The previous GeoCurrents post showed that the location of oil and natural gas deposits provides a partial explanation of the differences in the distribution of wealth and economic productivity across the country. But other factors must also be considered. Could…

Not surprisingly, the distribution of oil and natural gas provides one of the main explanations of Iran’s spatial pattern of economic productivity. As noted in the previous post, the coastal provinces of southwestern Iran post some of the highest production…

(Note: GeoCurrents has been on an extended hiatus due to personal issues and teaching obligations. I now hope to resume regular posting. My initial focus will be on Iran, for obvious reasons). Iran is usually regarded as a middle-income country.…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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