Random geography concepts
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Continental drip is the observation that southward-pointing landforms are more numerous and prominent than northward-pointing landforms. For example, Africa, South America, the Indian subcontinent, and Greenland all taper off to a point towards the south. The name is a play on continental drift.
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The observation was made by Ormonde de Kay in a 1973 tongue-in-cheek paper, which he introduced as “another earth-shaking new theory derived from simply looking at maps.” It satirizes the acceptance of plate tectonics theory as it was being formulated and refined at the time to describe the movement of the Earth’s continents that is now thoroughly accepted.
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Research suggests that north-south positions on maps have psychological consequences. In general, north is associated with richer people, more expensive real estate, and higher altitude, while south is associated with poorer people, cheaper prices, and lower altitude (the “north-south bias”). When participants were presented with south-up oriented maps, this north-south bias disappeared
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The land hemisphere and water hemisphere are the hemispheres of Earth containing the largest possible total areas of land and ocean, respectively. By definition (assuming that the entire surface can be classified as either “land” or “ocean”), the two hemispheres do not overlap.
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In geography, the centroid of the two-dimensional shape of a region of Earth’s surface (projected radially to sea level or onto a geoid surface) is known as its geographic centre or geographical centre or (less commonly) gravitational centre. Informally, determining the centroid is often described as finding the point upon which the shape (cut from a uniform plane) would balance. This method is also sometimes described as the “gravitational method”.