Explore Earth’s physical systems—from mountains and rivers to climate patterns and fragile ecosystems. This hub organizes our best guides to landforms and water, weather and climate, biodiversity, and today’s pressing environmental issues. Start here, then dive into focused subtopics or explore places by continent, country, and city.
On a hot afternoon in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, a small pool called Gaet’ale Pond is so salty that crystals crunch underfoot. On the other side of the world, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has lost most of its water and now sends salty dust toward nearby cities. From Ethiopia to Antarctica, the saltiest lakes in the […]
On any given day, you might check a weather app before leaving home, but hear about climate change on the evening news. The words sound similar, and many people mix them up. In this guide, we will unpack the difference with simple language, real-world examples, and clear comparisons. What is the difference between weather and […]
Rivers do not stay where maps put them. Channels creep sideways, islands rise out of muddy water, and banks crumble after big floods. Along a few international rivers, those quiet shifts can move the exact line of a border by a few yards. In some places, they even push it hundreds of yards from one […]
In most school atlases you meet mountains, plains, valleys and maybe a famous canyon or two. But Earth’s surface is full of stranger shapes that only specialists usually talk about. As of 2025, geomorphologists have mapped landforms so unusual that even many geography fans have never met their names: nubbins, poljes, mega-yardangs and more. What […]
Ask most people about Earth’s deepest place and they’ll jump straight to the Mariana Trench. That part is correct, but “deepest points on each continent” is a different question. It depends on how you define a continent, whether you count land under ice, and even which year you measure, because water levels are changing as […]
For years, a short stretch of countryside on the border between Poland and Lithuania has had an alarming label in headlines: “the most dangerous place on Earth.” This 60-mile (about 100-kilometer) strip, known as the Suwałki Gap or Suwałki Corridor, is where NATO territory squeezes between Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and its ally Belarus.If a conflict […]
Look at a world map and Iceland sits alone in the North Atlantic Ocean between Greenland and Norway. Some people say it belongs to North America, others insist it is European, and both sides can point to facts. In reality, Iceland’s geology and its politics tell slightly different stories. Is Iceland in North America or […]
On most world maps, Lake Baikal looks like a slim blue scar in the middle of Siberia. In reality, this “scar” is a huge lake about 395 miles (636 kilometers) long and surrounded by mountains. It is the deepest and one of the oldest freshwater lakes on Earth. It also holds more freshwater than any […]
If you draw a band across Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia, you trace one of Earth’s most important habitats: the taiga. This subarctic forest stores enormous amounts of carbon, shelters hardy wildlife and shapes weather far beyond its borders. For students, it is also one of the “big three” biomes they meet in class: tundra, […]
Imagine looking out of an airplane window as you fly over northern Canada or Siberia. For hundreds of miles (hundreds of kilometers), you see dark green forests, and then suddenly, the trees fade away into a low, open plain. That sharp boundary is where taiga gives way to tundra.Both biomes circle the high latitudes of […]
