The Contemporary Discipline

The academic discipline of geography is extremely broad in subject

matter and approaches; it contains specialists
covering diverse subjects but sharing concerns over places, spaces,
and environments. Indeed, the discipline is now fragmented into a
substantial number of separate subcommunities among some of which
there is relatively little contact. The Association of American
Geographers has more than 50 separate specialty groups, for example,
catering to its members’ particular interests. Some physical
geographers have stronger links outside their discipline than within it.
The International Geographical Union—based in Rome at the “Home
of Geography,” provided by the Italian Geographical Society—has
some two dozen commissions and about a dozen study groups.

Given this diversity of interests, encapsulating the contemporary

discipline in only a small number of categories is difficult. The main
division continues to be between physical and human geography, each
of which contains subdivisions and even sub-subdivisions.

Physical geography

Since the reorientation after 1970 of physical geography to the study of systems of
natural environmental processes, there have been major changes in both research and
teaching. Much research now involves large, tightly focused collaborative programs of
careful measurement, modeling, and analysis. It is much more demanding and
expensive in resources than previously: equipping field expeditions and laboratories and
learning related techniques necessarily generates specialization. This
is facilitated and integrated by major international interdisciplinary programs, such as
those associated with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) and the European Union (EU), as well as national research
councils and major government research bodies such as National Aeronautics and Space
Administration (NASA). Typical of this shift has been the relative demise of the study
of landforms. There are now two main research communities within geomorphology:
those who study contemporary processes and those who investigate environmental
change and landscape evolution since the beginning of the Quarternary Period (about
1.8 million years ago).

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The importance of water in erosion plus the transport and deposition of sedimentary
materials is reflected by work in geographical hydrology. This relative emphasis on
water in contemporary physical geography undoubtedly indicates the concentration of
English-speaking geographers working in temperate latitudes. There is also substantial
work in glaciology, reflecting ice’s role in creating many current temperate
environments, as well as—especially in the case of polar ice—in contemporary climatic
change. Similarly, much work is being done on dryland areas, a consequence of political
as well as intellectual interest in desertification and land degradation.

glacial ice meltingMelting glacial ice, San Rafael Glacier, Chile.© Ribeiroantonio/Shutterstock.com

Other areas of the natural environment attract less attention. There are few large
research teams in biogeography. Remotely sensed data are used to map land cover,
however, to estimate biomass and model ecosystems for work on biodiversity and the
carbon cycle, and to chart disturbances generated both naturally and by human-induced
events (e.g., bushfires). The geography of soils is only a minor field of study, with some
work on erosion and reclamation. Advances in climatology involve extremely large-scale
computer modeling from global to local focus, based on understanding atmospheric
physics and meteorology; relatively little of this involves geographers, whose main
contributions concern physical, synoptic, and applied climatology and climatic impacts
(i.e., on agriculture). These three subdisciplines remain part of many geography degree

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programs, however; indeed, geography departments offer more introductory work on
various aspects of the environment, at all scales, than do most other sciences.

Physical geography now concentrates on the Earth’s surface processes, therefore,

involving field and laboratory investigations of contemporary processes and the
reconstruction of past environments, especially the relatively recent past (which
includes collaboration with archaeologists). These are integrated in research programs
into past, contemporary, and future environmental changes. Concern about global
warming and climate change, sea-level changes, extreme environmental events, and
the loss of biodiversity stimulated modeling of environmental systems involving the
interactions among the Earth’s hydrological, ecological, and atmospheric components.
Building large models of these systems and their complex interrelationships involves
teams seeking not only to understand their operations but also to predict environmental
futures as bases for public policy making at global, international, national, and local
scales. Research reconstructing past environments puts current processes and changes
into longer-term perspective.

global sea surface height change, 1993–2008Change in sea surface height from 1993 to 2008, using
data collected from the Topex/Poseidon and Jason-1 satellites.NASA/JPL

The methods employed by physical geographers are those of environmental scientists

more generally; knowledge of relevant work in physics, chemistry, biology,

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and mathematics is necessary, and applications increasingly involve working with
engineers. Geographers have developed particular areas of expertise
within environmental science, as with the analysis of remotely sensed data. Processing
the massive databases produced daily involves major geocomputation expertise to
address these questions: What is where? How much is there? What condition is it in?

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