Word Finder - physiography

definition

The subfield of geography that studies physical patterns and processes of the Earth. It aims to understand the forces that produce and change rocks, oceans, weather, and global flora and fauna patterns.

definition

The descriptive part of a natural science as distinguished from the explanatory or theoretical part.

example

mineral physiography

The popular Physical meaning is better conveyed by the word physiography, a geography.

During the rapid development of physical geography many branches of the study of nature, which had been included in the cosmography of the early writers, the physiography of Linnaeus and even the Erdkunde of Ritter, had been as so much advanced by the labours of specialists that their connexion was apt to be forgotten.

In still more western fields of research much additional light has been thrown since 1875 on the physiography of the great deserts and oases of Arabia.

Lyons' The Physiography of the River Nile and its Basin (Cairo, 1906), and the authorities quoted in those works.

The Hindu Kush is, in fact, but the face of a great upheaved mass of plateau-land lying beyond it northwards, just as the Himalaya forms the southern face of the great central tableland of Tibet, and its general physiography, exhibiting long, narrow, lateral valleys and transverse lines of "antecedent" drainage, is XIII.

The physiography has enabled the state to become a great highway of commerce between the central part of the United States and the sea-coast, by rail and by water, along the Mohawk Gap and by other routes.

The islands may be divided broadly into volcanic and coral islands, though the physiography of many islands is imperfectly known.

The physiography of the state is the evident determinant of its climate, fauna and flora.

Mineral springs and hot springs are also a notable feature of Idaho's physiography, being found in Washington, Ada, Blaine, Bannock, Cassia, Owyhee, Oneida, Nez Perce, Kootenai, Shoshone and Fremont counties.

The physiography of the surrounding country shows clearly that the basin occupied by Great Salt Lake is one of many left by the drying up of a large Pleistocene lake, which has been called lake Bonneville.

Since 1895, however, the explorations of the United States Geological Survey and the Department of War, and other departments of the government, have fully established the main features of its physiography.

Since Wood first discovered a source of the Oxus in Lake Victoria in 1837, and left us a somewhat erroneous conception of the physiography of the Pamirs, the gradual approach of Russia from the north stimulated the processes of exploration from the side of India.

Physiography is well described in The Illinois Glacial Lobe (U.S. Geological Survey, Monograph, xxxviii.) and The Water Resources of Illinois (U.S. Geological Survey, Annual Report, xviii.).

Physical geography can also be called physiography.

By these paths the germs of Asiatic plants were carried over to join the endemic flora of the country, and all found suitable homes amid greatly varying conditions of climate and physiography.

The physical geography of Canada is so closely bound up with its geology that at least an outline of the geological factors involved in its history is necessary to understand the present physiography.

The name "Kurile" is derived from the Russian kurit (to smoke), in allusion to the active volcanic character of the group. The dense fogs that envelop these islands, and the violence of the currents in their vicinity, have greatly hindered exploration, so that little is known of their physiography.

It has been too often assumed that the plateau of Tibet and the uplands of the Pamirs are analogous in physiography, and that they merge into each other.