Physical Geography with Dr. Larsen

This episode, we talk about soil. Soils are complex mixtures of organic and inorganic material. We discuss soil’s relation to making scotch, causing famine, generating fungicides, synthesizing fertilizers, and theorizing Earth as a giant superorganism called Gaia.

The world exists on the edge in numerous ways. This episode, we examine how coastlines change as human-environment relationships change. We explore the beautiful, yet vulnerable coasts along Florida’s Key West, Europe’s Adriatic Sea, and California’s Malibu coast. To end, we examine how the Streisand Effect plays into human interactions with coastlines.

This episode, we will discuss rivers and controversy, drawing from some of my personal research on the matter. What will become clear by the end is that the environmental part of rivers cannot be understood without factoring in the human part. We will explore the stories of the Arkansas River, Missouri River, Ozark National Scenic Riverways, and the Tuttle Creek Dam of the Big Blue River.

The objective of today’s episode is to examine how weathering and erosion connect to the human relationship with the environment.  Too often, we take for granted the breakdown and movement of Earthly resources. In our discussion, we travel from Heart Mountain, Wyoming, to the North Pacific Garbage Gyre, to Florence, Italy, to Kansas City, Missouri, and finally to Budapest, Hungary.

For this week’s podcast, we shall explore some of the misconceptions people have about the Earth’s structure, earthquakes, and volcanoes.  Many of the topics discussed here arise from a new book called, Weird Earth: Debunking Strange Ideas About Our Planet, by Donald R. Prothero.  Prothero notes that holding bizarre ideas about the world does not necessarily correlate with level of intelligence.  In fact, bright people can develop very elaborate, though highly erroneous, rationalizations of their preexisting beliefs.

This podcast we will go over the relationship between landscape interpretation and field work, examine why timefulness matters in today’s world, identify how geologists determined Earth’s history, discover the ways in which plates on Earth’s crust interact with one another, and discuss the Anthropocene (Age of Humans).

In this podcast, we talk about the relationship between climate change and public perception. In the context of climate change, we will be introduced to methods of seeing the signal through the noise of information at our fingertips. We will also explore some ways to generate constructive conversations about climate change.

Today, we are going to talk about severe weather. All of our discussion about atmospheric energy, motion, and moisture has led us to explore the mechanics of extreme weather events—thunderstorms, tornados, hurricanes, droughts, and so on. What will hopefully become clear for you is that learning about severe weather entails learning about the people who experience it, just as much as how storms function.

Today, we are going to talk about how pressure causes air to move through the atmosphere, how air behaves differently depending on where you’re at, and how the relationship between motion and moisture in the atmosphere interrelate to generate changes in the environment.  We will end by identifying the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and why this event is important to physical geographers.

Greetings physical geographers! Welcome to the very first podcast of the Fall 2020 semester for Physical Geography. This podcast will serve as the online lecture of our hybrid course. Later in the week, I’ll also make available lecture slides that complement this podcast, for those who wish to practice their visual interpretation skills, check one of my references, or review what we learned in the podcast.