Shrake's World Regional Geography

By Alan Shrake

A systemic geography of the world, information for each realm in subsections of physical geography and cultural geography.  Academic vocabulary to learn.  Compare and contrast features in different places around the globe.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Shrake
• Release date: Jan 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781386213505

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Physical Geography of North America

This realm consists of the regions of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Deep South, Midwest, Plains, Southwest, the Rockies, Northwest, Eastern Canada, Prairies, British Columbia, Northwest Territories, and Alaska.  La Frontera is the transition zone with Middle America.  This realm is defined by English-speaking dominance and physiographic separation.

The granitic rock of the Laurasian Shield in Canada dates to 4.5 billion years old.  It is scarred by Pleistocene glaciations which also deranged rivers and lakes, but now experiences isostatic rebound.  The Rocky Mountains are a mixed orogeny of extrusive, intrusive, and diastrophic formations, complicated by terrane accretion (island arcs, submarine plateaus, microcontinental rafts).  The tallest peak is Mt. McKinley in Alaska at 20,320 feet.  Other features include Mt. Taylor, Shiprock, Pike’s Peak, Jemez and Yellowstone Calderas, and Devil’s Tower, WY. 

The East Coast is anchored by the 435 million-year-old Appalachian Mountains, including the Smokies, Blue Ridge, Allegheny, Poconos, Catskills, and Adirondacks.  The tallest peak is Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina at 6,684 feet.  The Valley-and-Ridge System’s asymmetrical folds include the Shenandoah Valley. 

Other ranges of the realm include the Ozarks, Ouchitas, dip slip batholith Sierra Nevada (with Mt. Whitney at 14,500 feet), volcanic mountain arc Cascades, and horst-and-graben Basin and Range. 

Plateaus include the Columbia, Modoc, Colorado, Llano Estacado, and Piedmont, with vistas like the Grand Canyon.  Deserts include the Mojave, Great Basin, Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Tamaulipan.  Carlsbad and Mammoth Caverns, as well as Florida’s dolines, are examples of karst topography.  Coastal features include Peninsulas (Florida, Labrador), and Islands (Channel, Padre, Long, Florida Keys, Ellesmere, Banks, Baffin, Victoria, Vancouver, and the Aleutians, a volcanic island arc created by tectonic plate convergence.

Erosion, weathering, and mass wasting created unchanneled sheetwash, rills, rivulets, gullies, streams, rivers, valleys, and floodplains, all in a drainage basin (or sub-basin) of stream orders downcutting to ultimate base level.  Lateral erosion causes meanders, cutbanks, pointbars, oxbow lakes, and yazoo streams. 

Rivers of the realm include the Mississippi (& Delta), Missouri, Ohio, Platte, Arkansas, Tennessee, Red, Rio Grande, Colorado, Columbia, Saskatchewan, St. Lawrence, and New River, oldest in North America. 

A lake is any body of water surrounded by land.  Lakes of the realm include the Great Lakes (Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, w/Niagara Falls), Great Salt Lake, the Salton Sea, Lake Missoula, Lake Powell, the Finger Lakes, Lake Okeechobee, and Canada’s Great Bear, Great Slave, Winnipeg, and Manitoba Lakes.  Groundwater aquifers like the Ogallala and San Joaquin Valley face drawdown, cones of depression, subsidence, contamination, and saltwater intrusion. 

Saltwater features include Oceans (Pacific, Atlantic), Seas (Bering, Beaufort, Labrador), Gulfs (Alaska, St. Lawrence, Mexico, California), Bays (MacKenzie, Baffin, Hudson, James, Chesapeake), and Straits (Florida, Hudson).

The Koppen climate regions are tundra, subarctic, humid continental (cool or warm summer), marine west coast, mediterranean, humid subtropical, tropical savanna, steppe, desert, and highland.  Weather events include arctic blizzards, cold and warm fronts, orographic uplift, tropical hurricanes, and Tornado Alley.  Death Valley is hottest at 134F, while Mt. Washington is windiest at 231 mph.

Soils are a combination of regolith, organic matter, moisture, air, and organisms like worms, thus affected by geologic and climatic conditions.  The soils of the realm include sandy entisols (Newfoundland, South Florida, Nebraska), immature inceptisols (Mississippi River Valley, Alaska, Northwest Territory), subsurface spodosols (North Florida, New England, Quebec), peat histosols (Hudson Bay), clayish alfisols (Texas, the Midwest), rich mollisols (Great Plains, Idaho), subtropical ultisols (the South), dry aridisols (the West), complex mountain soils, cryoturbating permafrost (Alaska, northern Canada), loess desert sand or glacial drift silt deposits (the Plains), and chernozems, the richest soil.

Plant and animal communities are integral to the landscape ecology.  The arctic tundra of mosses, lichens, grasses, sedges, ferns, dwarf willows, and alpine flowers supports caribou, reindeer, arctic fox, hare, lemming, wolf, polar bear, walrus, seal, and arctic terns, all threatened by ice loss, oil spills, permafrost melting, methane gas, and poaching.  The boreal taiga of coniferous and deciduous trees such as spruce, fir, pine, and birch, supports grizzly bear, black bear, lynx, moose, geese, and mosquitoes.  Western forests of pine, fir, spruce, cedar, aspen, cottonwood, redwood, bristlecone pine, and oak support spotted owl, marbled murrelet, beaver, otter, porcupine, and squirrels.  Mountain life zones correspond to latitudinal zones, but acid rain, bark beetles, drought, and fire are threats.  The Piney Woods of the South include the Big Thicket and the Cross Timbers, among other land uses.    Steppe grasslands and sagebrush support buffalo, blackfooted ferret, wolf, prairie dog, gopher, meadowlark, eagle, tortoise, and mustang. Chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and oak savanna support the California gnatcatcher and El Segundo Blue butterfly.  The Sonoran Desert has the highest diversity and density of any desert in the world, with mesquite, creosote, yucca, coyote, peccary, elf owl, gila monster, jackrabbit, roadrunner, and phainopepla.  Sawgrass and palmetto Everglades and mangrove hammocks in Florida support the panther, alligator, and manatee, despite eutrophication and urban sprawl.

Chapter 2:

Cultural Geography of North America

Proto-Amerindians migrated over the Bering Strait land bridge, or by canoe, up to 20,000 years ago, utilizing periglacial resources.  These Paleolithic peoples such as Clovis Man were a main cause for the great Megafaunal Extinction.  Waves of migrations settled the coasts, mountains, valleys, and islands, formed villages of native tribes, developed vast trade networks, and co-domesticated the pinto bean, corn, tomato, squash, and tobacco.

Advanced civilizations developed in Canada (Inuit, Chippewa, Cree, Algonquin), New England (Iroquois, Mohican, Delaware), the South (Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole, Taiño), Southwest (Comanche, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo), Great Plains (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Fox), California (Chumash, Gabrieleño, Kamia), and Northwest (Shoshone, Nez Pierce, Shasta).  Living in large settlements with various types of housing, they were skilled in the sciences, arts, and government.  California had the highest population, with 300,000.  The Cherokee formed the first public schools in the U.S. 

Admiral Hui Shan was the first to see the realm, in 458 A.D.  The Vikings settled Vineland on Newfoundland in 1000 A.D., but the idyll didn’t end until the arrival of Spanish, Dutch, English, French, and other explorers and colonists who began to exploit the resources and peoples of the Americas.  Twenty million natives soon became a few million through slavery, land alienation, massacre, and disease.  Colonial powers even fought one another, as in the French-Indian War (1754-63).  The English established colonies like