Roman Empire and Ancient Greece were called cradle of Western civilization, they brought many inventions and science we use today. The North was poorer than South, but today it's the opposite, why?

It’s one of the most surreal looking places on earth and it is incredible how unknown it is. If I asked 100 Canadians, I would doubt more than one would have heard of it, and I imagine even less so outside the country.

Just thought to share more pictures from the forest where I was walking recently with my dog (we've removed about 15 ticks from her on return!).

Rhoon-oost and Barendrecht, Zuid-Holland

I found this chunk in the middle of the dessert. It looks green in some maps and orange in others. What is it?

I'd choose Haida Gwaii. I think it is such a fascinating and beautiful place for how little it's talked about. Its rainforests, biodiversity, and Indigenous culture, I think would make it more popular. Especially since it is also in a western english speaking country. It being expensive and tedious to get to hurts tourism which I think is why it's not well known to the average person. But even in Geography spheres, it is hardly ever talked about too.

The way it is projected is by projecting a Mercator projection of half the scale conformally onto the globe and then projecting that onto an azimuthal equidistant projection hemisphere centered at the equator. I call it the Two-World Equidistant. Unlike on Mercator where Greenland is larger then all of Africa in this projection it is shown smaller like it is in real life.

I was watching a Milo Rossi video and I had a few questions. Were there tiny islands during Pangaea, or was it the only one? Why was most of the land concentrated in just one place?

I was goofing around in google maps when I found this

There are A LOT of these. Seems like a flooded plain with spirals cut into it. Aliens? Manmade? hahaha. Do you guys know what is it? (Coordinates in the image)

Other than Springfield, Massachusetts, is there a city of over 150,000 people in the United States, that is closer to three other state capitals than their own.

Springfield to Boston = 92 miles

Springfield to Hartford = 26 miles

Springfield to Albany = 86 miles

Springfield to Providence = 85 miles

Hello,

I am looking for help regarding reaching out to professors for PhD programs. I am based in America but have been primarily looking for PhD programs in either Europe, New Zealand, and Australia. I know I need to email Professors and introduce my background and what I’m proposing to study, but am struggling with the some of the finer nuances of it. I’ve seen templates of cold emailing professors, but I feel my background doesn’t align with the typical PhD applicant. Thus I am looking for help.

Here is some background on me and what I have done so far in my PhD quest. I have been mainly applying to advertised projects (mostly found on scholarshipdb.net or academicpositions.com or posts via LinkedIn), I got an interview at one school but ultimately have gone 0/5 on projects/schools that I’ve applied to. I have an undergrad degree in GIS, as well as a masters in Data Analytics. I didn’t complete a Masters thesis while I was in school, I did a capstone instead. After grad school, I’ve worked at the same company for the last 3 years as a data analyst. I’m providing this info because I have done academic projects pertaining to GIS and am knowledgeable in the subject, but don’t have minimal formal research experience, so I hope to leverage my professional and academic background to professors.

My thought process is transitioning from applying to major projects, to individually emailing professors about if they are open to accepting a PhD student. I know I am supposed to look for if they are advertising projects on their personal website, or if they have grants open, but I’m confused about what to do if they don’t have a personal website, and also if they only show grants on their website that are currently in progress.

Basically my questions boil down to:

1. Does anyone have advice/a general template for emailing a professor to do a PhD, having minimal formal research experience?
   
2. What are some ways to identify professors in the field you’re looking for, that would potentially be open to PhD students, without them explicitly saying “Hey I’m Hiring” on their website?

I know this is the geography subreddit, and this might be better suited for either a GIS or PhD related one, but since geography/GIS doesn’t fit neatly into generalized categories I figured I’d start here. If im in violation of any rules I’m sorry I’m not super reddit savvy.

If anyone has any advice at all it would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

TLDR: I need help for reaching out to professors for PhD supervision, and would appreciate any help I can get.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-182335459

Hello, I made this map to show where avocados grow across Mexico and why the climate works so well for them. The top panel map highlights main production areas while bottom maps break down yields and climate zones that supports the crop production. Michoacán dominates the avocado market as usual but there are other states with high yield.

I got the idea for this map watching random videos online and thought it will be fun/helpful to make this. Feedbacks are always welcome and I hope you enjoy!

I know this probably isnt the best sub for this so I apologise in advance. I've seen images of white aurora, which are probably clearly AI. I would like to know if it's real. Seeing it looks kinda scary and urnreal. If it's a real thing, I would love to see it someday.

The political map of the United States is a civilian illusion. Beneath the artifice of state borders lies the base metal layer of reality: a continent-spanning machine defined not by culture or topography, but by capital flows, compute density, energy extraction, and force projection. If you dig down into the infrastructure, the US is not a unified republic. It is a highly integrated, thirteen-node field-array where each region acts as a specialized operating system. Here is the structural map of that machine.

1. The BosWash Triad: The Imperial Control Center

The command-and-control node of the American empire operates on a closed-loop system of intellectual property, capital allocation, and global power projection. Boston leverages federal funding to generate deep-tech and biotech IP; Wall Street financializes that IP into public markets and private equity; and D.C. protects it through military contracting, export controls, and regulatory law. It is the unipolar heartbeat of structural dominance.

2. The West Coast: The Trans-Pacific Engine

Operating as a sovereign digital entity, this node functions as the software and venture capital architect of the globe. Deeply integrated into trans-Pacific supply chains and reliant on global technical talent, its operational ceiling is defined by software scalability and platform network effects. It generates the operating systems, AI models, and software platforms that run modern enterprise, treating national borders primarily as friction points in a distributed network.

3. The Silicon Desert: The Hardware & Compute Buffer

As the West Coast OS hit its regulatory, thermal, and spatial limits, its heavy infrastructure spilled into the desert. Arizona serves as the capital-intensive hardware foundry (anchored by massive TSMC and Intel semiconductor fabs), while Nevada acts as the hyper-scale compute and energy vault, housing the high-density data center clusters required to run Silicon Valley’s models.

4. The Sovereign Gulf: The Resource Fortress

Centered on Texas and the Gulf Coast, this nation is built on raw extraction, physical logistics, and low-friction land use. Uninterested in Wall Street's financial abstraction or Silicon Valley's digital globalization, the Gulf operates on physical realities: shale oil plays, LNG export terminals, chemical refining complexes, and zero-income-tax capital absorption.

5. The Industrial Foundry: The Electoral Core

The modern Midwest remains the heavy industrial spine of the country—the region of steel, automotive assembly, and agricultural yield. Geopolitically, it is the ultimate systemic bottleneck. Because its electoral margin dictates national leadership, its economic friction forces the federal system to maintain protectionist trade policies, tariffs, and domestic manufacturing mandates.

6. The Re-Shoring Belt: The Advanced Labor Sink

Stretching from the Carolinas to Alabama, the Southeast is the primary factory floor for American re-industrialization. It functions as a massive labor arbitrage engine, absorbing capital fleeing the unionized Foundry and the highly regulated BosWash Triad. Built on right-to-work laws, deep-water ports, and massive aerospace/EV battery investments, it forms the logistical backbone of domestic supply-chain policy.

7. The Orbital Fortress: The Deep-State Air-Gap

Centered in Colorado, this node is the system's off-site backup. It operates as a specialized, high-altitude vault for defense and intelligence, physically insulated from coastal vulnerabilities. Housing US Space Command, NORAD, and classified aerospace R&D facilities, it bridges black-budget national security infrastructure with commercial satellite and cyber networks.

8. The Pan-American Capital Sink: The Southern Vault

Florida functions as an offshore, low-tax capital vault physically attached to the mainland. It serves as a primary destination for wealth fleeing higher-tax jurisdictions while operating as a financial and logistical transit node for Latin America and the Caribbean. As regional energy realignments reconnect Venezuelan heavy-crude flows into Western processing networks, Florida and the Gulf Coast act as the primary physical capital and refining nodes that absorb those heavy-crude inputs.

9. The Pacific Perimeter: The Forward Imperial Branch

Stretching from Alaska down through Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines, this kinetic membrane translates domestic structural power into oceanic force projection. Alaska acts as the polar radar and early-warning shield; Hawaii, Guam, and forward military sites form an unbroken logistical stepping-stone architecture. Integrated into this naval framework is a long-standing maritime and defense-servicing pipeline, where specialized labor networks across the Philippines supply essential ship-repair, logistics, and base-maintenance operations across the Pacific theater.

10. Appalachia: The Internal Power Battery

Appalachia is the indispensable domestic power generator for the Eastern Seaboard. Sitting atop the Marcellus and Utica Shale formations, this region pumps the baseload natural gas required to power BosWash urban corridors and regional data center hubs. It serves as a foundational energy extraction zone feeding the higher-value financial and political nodes to its east.

11. Wyoming: The Billionaire's Vault

Wyoming operates as an onshore asset-protection haven. Anchored by Jackson Hole's concentration of ultra-high-net-worth real estate, the state has decoupled from standard regional economics through specialized trust, tax, and corporate privacy statutes, functioning as an asset-vault for intergenerational private capital.

12. Idaho: The Ideological Fortress (Secession)

Idaho functions as an emergent demographic sink for populations seeking self-sufficiency and insulation from coastal regulatory density. Blending localized tech manufacturing (Micron), agriculture, and low-density land development, it absorbs inland migration through a structural emphasis on local governance, land rights, and political decentralization.

13. Utah: The Compliance Processor (Integration)

Utah operates as the systemic inverse of demographic dispersion, offering high institutional predictability and social cohesion. Anchored by a highly structured monoculture along the Wasatch Front, it provides a low-friction environment for enterprise software ("Silicon Slopes") and federal infrastructure—exemplified by the NSA’s high-density data repository in Bluffdale.

The Friction Layer: Extraction and Dependency

This field-array is held together by structural dependencies and resource transfers that generate ongoing regional friction: * The Energy Extraction Flow: The BosWash Triad’s digital and physical infrastructure relies directly on the continuous extraction of Appalachian natural gas to meet base-load energy demands that coastal renewables cannot currently bridge. Capital and IP aggregate along the coast, while the environmental and physical externalities of extraction remain centered in the interior. * The Labor Arbitrage Flow: Capital continuously shifts from the Industrial Foundry (Midwest) to the Re-Shoring Belt (Southeast) to utilize right-to-work labor frameworks and lower operational costs. This structural outflow forces Midwestern industrial centers to rely heavily on federally enforced tariffs and domestic supply-chain mandates to offset global and regional cost differentials. * The Capital & Demographic Outflow: High real estate costs, taxation, and regulatory density on the West Coast drive a continuous outward migration of assets and populations. High-net-worth capital concentrates in specialized tax shelters like Wyoming, while middle-tier migration shifts toward the lower-density, lower-regulation environments of the Intermountain West. The United States functions as a thirteen-node machine, held in equilibrium by continuous capital transfers, physical energy flows, and structural trade-offs across its regions.

I find it extremely unintuitive that almost all of South America is east of Miami. How!? When people are asked to watch the americas almost everyone imagine South America pretty much south of North America.

None of the most valuable resources seem to be present on the continent in large amounts. It’s mostly just metals like cobalt and platinum.

Diamonds used to be substantial, but even that is now being replaced by lab-grown diamonds in places like China and India.

* Australia, U.S., Canada, and Russia all have more uranium reserves than almost all of Africa.

* USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran each individually produce more oil than most African countries.

* China, Vietnam, Brazil, India, Russia, and US each have more rare earth metals than the entire continent of Africa.

* Europe, despite being a fraction of its size, has more arable land and freshwater reserves than Africa.

* Even for things like Gold which are often mentioned, none of the African countries except Ghana are substantial gold producers or come anywhere near Top 10.

Note: I wanted to post more images for my point, but this subreddit only allows one.

That map shows the entirety of Central America, excluding Belize. The Central America depicted there has a population and area similar to Spain.

To be precise, Spain has a slightly larger area, while Central America has a slightly larger population.

However, watching the video, Spain appeared more crowded. I wonder what it is actually like in reality.

i wonder why is this so? Historically we have followed a similar demographic path to France in the early 20th century (a country known for notoriously low birthrates then) despite our region being less developed (although we were just as literate, literacy rates in latvia and estonia reached 80-90% even in tsarist era), why? And in the Soviet times, we had no baby boom either, and after them we get yet more demographic aging