Test #2                                    Study List

 

Updated 5 November ‘08 this is the final update.

 

 

NOTES FOR WED 12 NOVEMBER TEST

 

1)      You can bring a 3x5 card of handwritten notes (both sides) to the test.  If your card is any bigger you will have 10 points taken off your test score.

2)      Material in italics/purple will not be on the test.

 

World Locations knowledge:

 

Know the locations of the following countries such that you can mark them on a map.

 

Africa:

Algeria, Angola, Botswana, Central African Republic, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya, Madagascar, Mauritania, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zimbabwe. 

 

Europe:

Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom

 

Course content:

Ocean circulation

·         Heat exchange performed by ocean currents

  • El Nino/La Nina: Known as ENSO, El Nino-Southern Oscillation,  4-10 year cycle originating in the tropical Pacific Ocean
    • El Nino Stage = weakened trade winds, eastward flow of warm equatorial Pacific waters to the west coast of the Americas, increased rainfall in California, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, less cold water  upwelling, etc... w/ Australia & Indonesia experiencing droughts that enable fires to grow into large forest fires
    • La Nina Stage = strengthened trade winds, westward flow of warm tropical Pacific waters towards the western Pacific, where Australia & Indonesia experience excessive rains, and the West of the Americas (especially equatorial) experience drier conditions. (See focus box in the book)

 

Climate change (please read the book section)

  • Humans as modifying landscape, also climate
  • Source of knowledge of previous climates
  • Climate fluctuations before humans: earths orbit around sun, solar activity, volcanic activity, continental drift (very long time scale)
  • Historical correspondence of warming with carbon dioxide.
  • Industrial revolution and carbon dioxide
  • Complex issue: prediction of carbon dioxide increase
  • Growing realization that humans are the likely cause of global warming through placement of carbon into the atmosphere
  • Consequences of global warming: hard to predict beyond sea level rise, but will include global climate changes, biosphere changes, rates of change unknown. 
  • Kyoto protocol, US non-participation, but individual cities eg Seattle are participants!
  • Sustainability.

 

101 Chapter 3            LANDFORMS

 

·         Landforms as a balance between land formation and land removal

·         Geomorphology: study of landforms and landforming processes

·         Endogenic and exogenic processes

 

Endogenic processes: Land formation or ‘land growth’

·         Plate tectonics: Pangea, continental drift (Alfred Wegener in 1920s)

·         Evidence: shape, fossil, relative location of landforms, current movement!

·         Mechanism: convection currents within the ‘plastic’ magma of the mantle carry ‘plates’

·         Two sorts of plates: ocean and continental

·         Convergent, divergent and transform boundaries

·         Resultant landforms along plate boundaries: midocean ridges, ocean trenches, volcanoes (shield and composite), faults and earthquakes, rift valleys.

·         Experiencing movement here: earthquakes and tsunamies

·         Characteristics of earthquakes, epicenter, focus, shock waves decay with distance, earthquake waves as reflecting in sediment filled basins, areas of wave interference (like wave chop on windward side of Hood Canal Bridge) result in greater shaking

·         Faults and Folding

·         Rocks: Composed of collection of usually about 5 minerals in crystal form: eg silicon, magnesium, iron, aluminuim

·         Rock types: igneous, sedimentary, metamorphic, know examples

 

Exogenic processes:

·         Weathering of rock: Chemical and mechanical

·         Erosion as removing weathered material (gravity, water, wind, ice, humans)

·         Deposition is when eroded material is left behind

·         Streams and rivers, gentle and steep gradients, deposition and erosion

·         Humans erosion and deposition: agriculture, construction and forestry- can increase erosion by wind and water.

·         Glaciers: act to rearrange loose material on earth and also carve anything from scratches to deep U-shaped channels hundreds of feet deep.  Not something that we think about much but they have formed some of America’s iconic landscapes: Yosemite. Also Puget Sound and Hood Canal environments, Illahee.

·         Continental glaciation and Alpine glaciation; moraine as being unsorted dumps of boulders and gravels and sand

·         Wind: erosion and deposition (dunes),

·         Coastal erosion: wind waves and  tsunamis, currents, alongshore transport, sea level rise as affecting coastal erosion.

·         Erosion produces cliffs, deposition produces beaches

·         Human impact on coastal processes, new patterns of erosion and deposition.

·         Speed of these endogenic and exogenic processes varies, hence the degree of hazard varies

·         Bremerton and Seattle hazards,

·         Hazard mitigation through preparation

 

Chapter 4 Biogeochemical cycles and the Biosphere

 

·         Biogeochemical cycles: pathways in which energy and matter are transformed and recycled in Earth Systems because Earth is essentially a closed system.

·         Many elements circulate though Earth, but the prime ones that people study because of their importance to living organisms are the hydrologic, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon cycles.  (Also these elements exist in large quantities)

·         Hydrologic cycle: importance of water, 60 - 70% of us, where there is water there is life, water is a solvent for many elements.

·         Hydrologic cycle,

·         Recharge basins, water table, aquifers, pollution, salinization, effects of rainforest reduction.

·         Carbon cycle: photosynthesis, respiration

·         Trees as storing carbon.

·         Role of Nitrogen fixing bacteria in plants

·         Soil: Thin layer where lithosphere and biosphere merge.

·         Consists of inorganic material + organic material + biological and gravitational mixing

·         Soil properties a function of: climate, parent material, plants and animals, topography, time.

·         Soil formation

·         Soil horizons

·         Humans and soil: nutrient reduction, erosion, saliniation, pesticides & herbicides, organic farming and composting.

·         Ecosystems: all living organisms in an area and their physical environment

·         Ecosystems can be large or small, remember Illahee State park

·         Elements; Producers, consumers, decomposers, materials and energy

·         Food chains

·         Food pyramid and biomagnification in food chains

·         Succession eg forest and desert

·         Invasive species

·         Biodiversity and biosphere reserves

·         Biomes: very large groupings of related ecosystems, determined by climate

·         Biomes: eg. Tropical Rain Forest, Temperate rain forest, boreal forest, tropical savanna, mediterranean shrubland, midlatitude grasslands, desert, tundra.

 

 

Movie

 

Blue Planet 629.45 BL 625W DVD-0070 in the OC library available for in-library viewing.  (There are other videos with the title Blue Planet so be sure you get this) NASA’s mission to Planet Earth.  Types of information you can get from space. Impact of people on Earth.

 

 

Chapter 5 Population and Migration… we will cover this before the test but it will be on the final test

  • Distribution of people in the world, continents, major concentrations of population
  • Emigration and immigration
  • Demography (what does this word mean)
  • Cartogram
  • Population density
  • Factors influencing population distribution: Climate, topography, soils, history
  • Trend in global population growth
  • Zero population growth
  • Significance of a fertility rate of 2.1
  • Regional variations in population growth
  • Population pyramids, population pyramid for the United States, countries with a lower fertility rate, countries with an AIDS problem that is killing people between the ages of 20 and 40.
  • Demographic transition model, three stages
  • Technological and cultural influences on birthrates
  • Epidemiology, infectious and degenerative diseases
  • Overpopulation,
  • Migration, push and pull factors, Irish potato famine, lure of America, representation in media
  • Prehistoric migration perhaps from a single stock
  • European migration in the C19th, economic greed and insatiable curiosity about a world full of as yet undiscovered natural and cultural artifacts. 
  • African slavery
  • Immigration today: many characteristics of refugees (negative and positive)
  • Refugees: a choice between death and immigration
  • Asylum
  • Advantages and disadvantages of immigrants to a country, advantages and disadvantages of being an immigrant, discrimination and culture shock, economic hardship.
  • Melting pot or cultural mosaic
  • US 10% foreign born, Canada 18.4% foreign born