Geographical biography

Why is it needed at all, geography? In the representation of the ancient Indians, remember what the geographer did in the “little prince” of Antoine de Saint-Exupery? He wrote a pencil in a thick book of travelers about the distant lands in which they visited. And of course, he checked the reliability of these stories, as well as the moral appearance of the traveler - what if he, for example, is a drunkard.

He says that he saw two mountains, but in fact there was one mountain, and he just had doubled in his eyes ... With such a narrow specialization, this geographer would definitely be left without work today. Almost every square kilometer of the earth's surface is described in detail today, studied and applied to numerous cards. If geographical science would have been exhausted only by the task of land description, as follows from the meaning of the word “geography”, it could be safely “closed” at the beginning of the last century.

Fortunately, this is not so. With the development of society, new tasks appear that need to be solved. To open a new mainland - yes! Well, or at least, find a forgotten city of Hara-Hoto lost in the sands of the Gobi desert. And who, in addition to several narrow specialists, is the stratigraphy of the Black Sea waters or, say, paleogeographic reconstruction of the territory of Western Siberia?

In fact, of course, there is no need to worry about the fate of geography. The more we learn about our planet, the more questions appear. So today's geography is not at the final stage of its existence, but, on the contrary, at the beginning of the new, the next. So those who wish to become a geographer are given an ever wider selection of specialization - geomorphology, geographicism, cryolitology, oceanology, glaciology, hydrography, geobotanics and zoogeography, geoecology, ethnogeography and many others, for the transfer of which several pages would require.

And today's geographer will not remain without work. Logistics and road construction, tourism, spatial organization of the territory, economic and social forecast - all these areas of activity require serious geographical knowledge. And to study, for example, the dynamics of atmospheric processes is not enough at all - this atmosphere is very dynamic. Moreover, the world community, preoccupied with global warming and at the same time the prospect of equally global cooling, is vividly interested in research in this area ...

Here it is - evolution of evolution implies development; Therefore, somewhere in the depths of centuries there should be the beginning of everything. In our case, the beginning of science, which two and a half thousand years ago gained its own name. Thanks to Eratosphena, the name turned out so successful that it has been safely preserved to this day. And geography itself, as a field of knowledge, appeared, of course, long before it.

Probably, even long before the construction of the Alexandrian library, the director of which was the famous Greek. In any case, such an indispensable geography tool as a map was known to the Schumer at least a year BC. It all started with him. ” So the American geographers Jeffrey Martin and Preston James in his, which have long become classic, “All possible worlds” “All Possible Worlds” have been determined.

Better, in my opinion, you can’t say. Well, something, and there was always enough curiosity to a person. This remarkable quality of mankind has inherited, probably, from its shaggy and tailed ancestors. And, fortunately, it has not yet been lost. Petroglyphs - they are from five to seven thousand years. The Karelia hunting scene of two inextricably linked issues accompanied a person for thousands of years: what and where?

Curiosity is curiosity, but our ancestors did not have an excess of time to satisfy it.

And therefore, presumably, the answers to the above questions had vital applied significance. Need to hunt? Where and to whom? And the great -grandfather, it turns out, not only found out for a long time, but I was not too lazy to draw a card on a rock. And on it he especially noted the place where the deer river are crossed, which means that the most vulnerable.

The war without exploration of the area will inevitably end in defeat. The nature of the relief, water sources, the type and characteristics of the vegetation, the presence or absence of swamps, their potential cross -country ability - all this needed to be found out before boldly, shaking the weapon and terrifying the enemy with combat cries, invade foreign territory.

Moreover, this is important if you command not fifty robbers, but by a thousands of troops, which includes a cavalry and a huge convoy. This is the same, Alexander of Macedon, according to legends, one of his greatest treasures revered a cypress chest with maps and descriptions of the lands that were supposed to be conquered. But Xerxes, going to Greece, obviously counted on the incredible number of his army and geographical information neglected that ultimately cost him dearly.

Marco Polo gave a description of his travels in Asia and Africa, committed between and years, in the “Book on the Variousness of the World”.It is also called the "Book of the Wonders of the World" as a rule, long before the marching armies, trade caravans penetrated the ground to the ground. It was with them that, probably, what we now call economic geography began. All the same questions, where and what, but with other answers.

And in addition to them there are several more, fundamentally important. For example, how to get there and go back alive, and even with goods. And for what kind of product should you go to one or another distant lands, or even for the seas. And what needs to be taken for sale, given the needs of the local population. The Family of the Polo of the XIII century went east is unlikely to be purely scientific interest, however, the description of this many years of wanderings, the “Book of Marco Polo”, for more than a century has remained for Europeans the main source of geographical information about the countries and peoples of Central and East Asia.

It is no accident that in “Walking for the Three Seas” Athanasius Nikitin, written nearly two centuries later, the plots and accents about the same: the professions of the authors coincided. The route of Athanasius Nikitin initially geography as science developed in two directions. As a rule, it is still associated with a description of certain, especially distant and exotic, territories and countries.

Countless tourist reference books and guidebooks on the shelves of bookstores are the direct offspring of these descriptions: “On the diversity of the world” by Marco Polo, “Walking for Three Seas” by Athanasius Nikitin and even the famous letter of America Vespucci to Lorenzo Medici, thanks to which the concept of “New Light” appeared in the vocabulary of geographers. Since the basis for these descriptions, as a rule, there were personal impressions, their “ancestor”, probably, should be considered Aristotle, with his famous parting words to the students: “Go and look”.

At least one of them, Alexander of Macedon, learned the lessons of his great teacher, judging by the results, very good. The second direction can be conditionally called "mathematical geography." The shape and size of the Earth, the definition, measurement and fixation of directions and distances, as well as an indication of the location of a particular object on the earth's surface - all this was the subject of understanding and studying from the same time immemorial, when the Sumerians painted their first cards on clay tablets.

Thales Miletsky, one of the founders of Greek philosophy of the 5th century BC. And we owe the concepts of geographical longitude and latitude to those who lived in the II century BC. The evolution of their ideas, these ideas, was initially plenty of. For example, numerous options for representing the shape and size of the Earth. The classic flat disk on the backs of elephants was replaced by an ideal sphere in the days of Aristotle.

However, this sphere, as you know, also did not hang freely in space, but held on the shoulders of Atlanta. Supporters of the idea of ​​the flat world and now there are plenty of, especially after the release of the book “Flat World” of the wonderful English writer Terry Pratchett. But, since our ancestors could not help but notice that with an rise on the slope of the mountain, the horizon was pushing, the flat disk quickly turned into a hemisphere.

With a flat, of course, the basis for elephants to hold it-they have no hands, unlike Atlanta. The shape of the earth is not a ball, not an ellipsoid; For her, they came up with a special name: geoid. Australian cartographers depicted a friendly cartoon on this unique object. However, as the Aristotelian measuring instruments, the ideal sphere turned into a spheroid, then into an ellipsoid, and now, as a rule, is called a geoid, since there has not yet been found analogues of our planet from the point of view of its form.

For many centuries, the idea of ​​the southern continent, “Terra australis Inkognita”, has lasted, since it, according to ancient Greek geographers, would certainly lead to the overwhelming of the planet with the corresponding, very sad, consequences for all its inhabitants. The idea was almost buried by the great James Cook, not finding sushi south of the parallel.

However, the mainland nevertheless turned out to be quite real, which was successfully proved by Bellingshausen and Lazarev. Not all geographical discoveries were lucky like Antarctica. Since people have learned to cross the oceans, the "great" discoveries fell one after another. The islands were generally opened and applied to the card almost annually. But subsequently, no one found them according to the indicated coordinates.

Perhaps some of these islands, for example, first opened by the Englishman Frobisher, a large and gloomy island of the Bousse for the year, really existed, but were subsequently absorbed by the ocean. In any case, according to the coordinates of this island, two hundred years later, Captain Richard Piciresil found extensive shallows in the Atlantic. The progress of means and methods as a teacher of geography in the physical and mathematical lyceum, getting to know the subject for new students, as a rule, begin with the wording: modern geography is half mathematics, a quarter of physics and the rest are romance.

The wording, of course, is very approximate, but related to reality. Of course, in the arsenal of the geographer there are means and methods that have survived millennia - personal observations, instrumental survey of the terrain, analysis of information sources. With the accumulation of the database to them, naturally, the possibility of comparative analysis was added. So, for example, the geological similarity of the Indian plateau of the dean and the Middle Izbirsk Plairer highly facilitated the search for Yakut diamond -bearing tubes at one time.

The emergence of sea vessels that could cross oceans, as well as ways of regarding the exact determination of geographical longitude with breadth, managed much earlier made it possible to open and master the New World. Aerial photography and, later, cosmic shooting fundamentally changed the process of mapping the earth's surface, and the possibility of computer processing of data led to the emergence of geographic information systems of GIS.

Laser geodetic instruments, such as theodolites and levels, greatly facilitated the labor -intensive processes of topographic survey, significantly increasing its accuracy. And constant monitoring of the surface of the planet from a distance of several hundred or even thousands of kilometers, and even in various parts of the spectrum allows you to solve not only scientific, but also economic problems in the range from the weather forecast to the warning about the danger of tsunami and the state of forests.

Early enough appeared such a useful thing as geographical modeling. Initially - purely empirical, of course. A great example of geographical modeling of this kind, especially for use in school geography, the autobiographical novel by Leo Cassil Konduit and Swampbanium. Readers of the older generation undoubtedly remember him, and current students are happy to read if there is someone who recommends this book to them.

The characters of the book came up with a whole island with a coastline, a relief and a hydrological network, as well as a political map. Model Johann von Tunen. According to the author, around a round city should be located ring economic zones mathematical models in geography also have a long history. When building his model, Tyunen first applied the principle of uniformity of space, deliberately ignoring the whole variety of natural and social factors, as well as their dynamics.