Dualism

Dualism

In his critical investigation of geography as a single, unified field of science, Kraft finds that, while one could dismiss the charge of dualism of content--natural and human features--as invalid, the inclusion of the systematic and the regional points of view was an unquestionable form of dualism. He agrees with Hettner, however, that this dualism cannot be expressed simply as the combination of a nomothetic and an idiographic science; systematic geography must include the study of unique cases, and regional geography must use generic concepts and principles. In any case, neither construction of laws nor the description of the unique represents the purpose of geography, or of any other science. The purpose of geography is the same in both branches, the comprehension of the areal differentiation of the earth, and this purpose cannot be solved either by systematic studies alone nor by regional studies alone, but requires both approaches. Consequently, he concludes, this dualism in approach is justified as necessary for the single aim which makes geography a unified science

This view, we may add, is further supported by the fact, stressed by Hettner, that it is frequently difficult to classify particular studies under one heading or the other. The difference is not in the substance, but in the point of view, and in certain kinds of studies these may be combined. For example, the systems of land-use classification previously discussed (Sec. X F, G) are intended to provide backgrounds for agricultural regional geography and they involve, in outline, a major part of the regional study of any area. At the same time, however, they represent systematic studies of particular element-complexes in their world distribution, so that it is by no means clear whether they belong more in the one or the other of our two major divisions.


Finally, if one agrees that both regional and systematic studies are included as essential parts of geography, we may perhaps dismiss any question of relative importance as irrelevant. For systematic geography, regional studies provide, not merely a source of detailed factual information that otherwise would hardly be available, but they also indicate problems of relationships that might easily be overlooked in systematic geography, and they provide the final testing ground for the generic concepts and principles of systematic geography. On the other hand, it is even more obvious that progress in interpretation of the interrelated phenomena of regional geography is constantly dependent on the development of such universals by systematic studies. Any assumption that these studies can be left to the systematic sciences concerned with each particular category of phenomena has been shown by experience to be unwarranted. The aspects of these phenomena with which geography is concerned--their relation to other earth phenomena in different parts of the world--are not of direct concern to those systematic sciences and are more commonly left unstudied, unless geographers study them, as Lehmann has shown. Systematic geography, he therefore concludes, is not to be thought of as a border area of geography, or merely as a propaedeutic, but represents "organs vital to the growth of geography, without which its regional crowning can as little exist as a real tree without its roots" 

Areal differentiation

Humboldt and Ritter often
are argued to be the founders of the regional approach
and scientific geography; however, they differed on
several fronts. First, Humboldt was secular, whereas
Ritter was religious. Second, Humboldt focused on
the physical environment, whereas Ritter focused on
human geographies. Third, Humboldt worked at a
fine level of areal differentiation, whereas Ritter
worked at the scale of continents.

CHOROLOGY
In the wake of the collapse of environmental determinism,
the discipline embraced a long-standing tradition
of chorology, also known as areal differentiation. In
Europe, a central figure in this vein was Paul Vidal de
la Blache (1845–1918), considered the father of
French geography and well known for his studies of
small rural areas called pays and their associated styles
of life (or genres de vies). He also played a central role
in the introduction of possibilism to the discipline. His
German counterpart was Alfred Hettner (1859–1941),
who argued in the Kantian tradition that geography
consisted of the art of regional synthesis, seeking relations
among phenomena that other disciplines ignored.
In the United States, the most famous advocate of
chorology was Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992), who
studied under Hettner and then graduated from the
University of Chicago in 1924. Chorologists maintained
that the essence of the discipline was the
description of regions in all of their glorious uniqueness
and complexity, including cultural and physical
phenomena. Hartshorne argued that the most productive
analyses focused on small, relatively homogeneous
regions, noting that any deployment of the regional
concept was inherently a subjective tool to find meaning
in the unwieldy complex of data found in the
world. Thus, regions were mental tools to impose
order on chaos. By eschewing theory, chorology
found itself mired in empiricism and the discipline’s
theoretical and philosophical progress was halted.

Chorology drew to a close during the 1950s,
beginning with a famous attack on Hartshorne’s
worldview by Frederick Schaefer in 1953. Essentially,
Schaefer claimed that the view that geography is an
integrative science concerned with the unique was
naive and arrogant because such issues were common
to many sciences. By refusing to search for explanatory
laws, geography condemned itself to what
Schaefer called an immature science. Rather than
seeking idiographic regions, geographers should seek
nomothetic regularities across regions. This critique
helped open the door to the rise of positivism and the
quantitative revolution.


IDIOGRAPHIC
The term idiographic refers to the unique aspects of
individual areas, that is, those that cannot be understood
easily on the basis of general rules of inference
or deduction. Much of geography traditionally has
been concerned with the idiographic in the context of
regions and places, long mapping the colorful and
extraordinary. However, the uniqueness of places has
also been at the center of significant philosophical
debates about how to study geography.
The tradition of chorology or areal differentiation,
which predominated during the early 20th century and
was epitomized by Richard Hartshorne, maintained
that geography is an integrative science that is concerned
exclusively with the unique. In this perspective,
regions form the highest form of understanding.
Idiographic understanding holds that each region is a
Idiographic
unique combination of physical and human elements
in the landscape. Smaller regions are more likely to be
more internally homogeneous, and broader ones can
be understood through the accretion of small units.
Upholding the idiographic in this manner essentially
disregards the need for general themes or causal properties
that transcend regions, the key point of nomothetic
(law-seeking) approaches to geography. Thus,
the idiographic has long been associated with empiricist
and inductive forms of thought in geography, that
is, generalization without explanation


AREAL DIFFERENTIATION
The American version of regional geography reached
its apex between the two world wars with the ascent
of the school variously labeled as areal differentiation,
chorology, or regional description. The ascent of
this line of thought was to be found in the aftermath
of environmental determinism, when the discipline’s
retreat from theory sharply differentiated it from other
social sciences that were making great strides. Its
embodiment is Richard Hartshorne (1899–1992) and
his definitive landmark text, The Nature of Geography
(published in 1939). Having studied under Hettner
and thus heavily Kantian in outlook, Hartshorne made
Regional Geography———405
a variety of claims regarding regional geography as
the definition of the discipline’s core and claim to
uniqueness within the academic division of labor.
Geography, like history, was synthetic, integrating the
analysis of different phenomena as they were manifested
in unique combinations in particular places.
Regions allowed the analysis of both human and
physical phenomena, transcending the growing schism
between two parts of the discipline. Because the complexity
of the world is overwhelming, Hartshorne advocated
the study of small regions with relatively little
internal variation, accreting this into a mosaic that
would encompass larger areas. This view subscribed
to a crude spatial determinism in which proximity came
to stand for causality; where things were enough to
ascertain their nature, and closer phenomena were more
likely to be related than more distant ones. He well
understood that regions are only tools and, in the vein
of Kant, maintained that regions are only mental constructs,
that is, simplifications of the world that the
mind uses to impose order on the world.
Hartshorne essentially regarded regions as static
and held little regard for the need to engage in the
study of explanatory processes; that is, regional
geography was to be only about appearances. This
approach represented a spatialized version of the philosophy
of empiricism (with its roots in the British
Enlightenment), that is, the assumption that facts and
data are true or false without appeal to theory. In contrast,
more recent approaches argue that all data are
theory laden; that is, it is theory that informs us what
facts are relevant to an issue at hand. There are no
pure facts, given that observations always are couched
in terms of a theory; observation requires interpretation,
which in turn requires theory. Hartshornian
chorology was the essence of inductive empiricism,
and its Achilles’ heel was the inability to engage in
abstraction.
American regional empiricism suffered a devastating
set of setbacks during the 1950s as it was pushed
aside by an increasingly assertive school of positivists.
A famous article by Frederick Schaefer published
in 1953 charged that Hartshorne’s claim that
geography alone studied the unique was naive, arrogant,
and immature. All sciences face the problem of
uniqueness, and explanation (as opposed to regional
description) consisted of embedding the unique within
a wider understanding of laws and causal processes.
Schaefer opened the door to a heated debate about
whether geography should be concerned primarily
with the nomothetic (i.e., law seeking) or be content
with the idiographic (i.e., the unique). The rise of positivism
saw the triumph of the nomothetic approach
and the discipline shift from the study of all aspects of
one place to the study of one aspect of many places, a
move that entailed a reorientation from the concrete to
the abstract, from induction to deduction, from a concern
with the specific to a pursuit of the universal.
Ultimately, the demise of chorology saw the discipline
change from a concern with regions without explanatory
laws to one obsessed with laws devoid of regions.
Some observers, such as John Hart, maintained that
regional geography nonetheless played an important
role in minimizing armchair theorizing and in popularizing
the discipline at large.

ISOSTASY

Isostasy (Greek ísos "equal", stásis "standstill") is the state of gravitational equilibrium between Earth's crust and mantle such that the crust "floats" at an elevation that depends on its thickness and density. This concept is invoked to explain how different topographic heights can exist at Earth's surface.

Isostasy

If you were to take a large rubber ball and place something heavy on top of it, such as a bowling ball, what do you suppose would happen to the rubber ball?

The weight of the bowling ball will push the skin of the rubber ball inward, creating a dent. Scientists observe the same phenomena with the Earth’s crust. When the Earth’s crust is pushed down, creating a small dent, we refer to this as isostasy.

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Isostasy takes place on the Earth wherever a large amount of weight is present. This weight might be due to a large mountain, ice from an ice age, or even from manmade structures, such as the weight from large manmade lakes.

Isostasy also takes place when a large amount of weight is removed from an area, causing that portion of the Earth’s crust to rise, such as when ice caps melt.

Play with Isostasy: http://www.geo.cornell.edu/hawaii/220/PRI/isostasy.html

Isostasy

Isostasy (also spelled Isotacy) is a geophysical phenomenon describing the force of gravityacting on crustal materials of various densities (mass per unit volume) that affects the relative floatation of crustal plates. Isostasy specifically describes the naturally occurring balance of mass in Earth's crust .

Continental crust and oceanic crust exist on lithospheric plates buoyant upon a molten, highly viscous aethenosphere. Within Earth's crustal layers, balancing processes take place to account for differing densities and mass in crustal plates. For example, under mountain ranges, the crust slumps or bows deeper into the upper mantle than where the land mass is thinner across continental plains. Somewhat akin to how icebergs float in seawater, with more of the mass of larger icebergs below the water than smaller ones, this bowing results in a balance of buoyant forces termed isostasy.

Isostasy is not a process or a force. It is simply a natural adjustment or balance maintained by blocks of crust of different mass or density.

Within Earth's interior, thermal energy comes from radioactive energy that causes convection currents in the core and mantle. Opposing convection currents pull the crust down into geosynclines (huge structural depressions). The sediments that have collected (by the processes of deposition that are part of the hydrologic cycle ) are squeezed in the downfolds and fused into magma . The magma rises to the surface through volcanic activity or intrusions of masses of magma as batholiths (massive rock bodies). When the convection currents die out, the crust uplifts and these thickened deposits rise and become subject to erosion again. The crust is moved from one part of the surface to another through a set of very slow processes, including those in Earth's mantle (e.g., convection currents) and those on the surface (e.g. plate tectonicsand erosion).

With isostasy, there is a line of equality at which the mass of land above sea level is supported below sea level. Therefore, within the crust, there is a depth where the total weight per unitarea is the same all around the earth. This imaginary, mathematical line is called the "depth of compensation" and lies about 70 mi (112.7 km) below the earth's surface.

Isostasy describes vertical movement of land to maintain a balanced crust. It does not explain or include horizontal movements like the compression or folding of rock into mountain ranges.

Greenland is an example of isostasy in action. The Greenland land mass is mostly below sea level because of the weight of the ice cap that covers the island. If the ice cap melted, the water would run off and raise sea level. The land mass would also begin to rise, with its load removed, but it would rise more slowly than the sea level. Long after the ice melted, the land would eventually rise to a level where its surface is well above sea level; the isostatic balance would be reached again, but in a far different environment than the balance that exists with the ice cap weighing down the land.

Scientists and mathematicians began to speculate on the thickness of Earth's crust and distribution of landmasses in the mid-1800s. Sir George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) assumed that the density of the crust is the same throughout. Because the crust is not uniformly thick, however, the Airy hypothesis suggests that the thicker parts of the crust sink down into the mantle while the thinner parts float on it. The Airy hypothesis also describes Earth's crust as a rigid shell that floats on the mantle, which, although it is liquid, is more dense than the crust.

John Henry Pratt (1809–1871) proposed his own hypothesis stating that the mountain ranges (low density masses) extend higher above sea level than other masses of greater density. Pratt's hypothesis rests on his explanation that the low density of mountain ranges resulted from expansion of crust that was heated and kept its volume, but at a loss in density.

Clarence Edward Dutton (1841–1912), an American seismologist and geologist, also studied the tendency of Earth's crustal layers to seek equilibrium. He is credited with naming this phenomenon "isostasy."

A third hypothesis, eventually developed by Finnish scientist Weikko Aleksanteri Heiskanen (1895–1971) was a compromise between the Airy and Pratt models.

The model most accepted by modern geologists is the Hayford-Bowie concept. Advanced by American geodesists John Fillmore Hayford (1868–1925) and John William Bowie (1872–1940), geodesists, or specialists in geodesy, are mathematicians who study the size, shape, and measurement of Earth and of Earth forces (e.g., gravity). Hayford and Bowie were able to prove that the anomalies in gravity relate directly to topographic features. This essentially validated the idea of isostasy, and Hayford and Bowie further established the concept of the depth of isostatic compensation. Both gentlemen published books on isostasy and geodesy. Hayford was the first to estimate the depth of isostatic compensation and to establish that Earth has an oblate spherical shape (a bowed or ellipsoid sphere) rather than a true sphere.

terminologies

Fiber rolls technique

A fiber roll is a temporary erosion control and sediment control device used on construction sites to protect water quality in nearby streams, rivers, lakes and seas from sediment erosion. It is made of straw, coconut fiber or similar material formed into a tubular roll.

Installation
Each horizontal contour level row of fiber rolls is installed on slopes, ending with one at the base of the slope, below an active construction area before soil disturbance (earth moving) begins. The space between each row of fiber roll is dependent on the steepness of the slope. The steeper the slope, the more rows of evenly spaced horizontal contour level fiber rolls are used. Each fiber roll is installed on a horizontal contour level in shallow trenches 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 cm) deep and fastened to the ground with wooden stakes.
Properly installed fiber rolls are effective at trapping sediment, generally more effectively than straw bales.During rain storms, the rolls intercept surface stormwater runoff (but not concentrating or channeling the runoff) and reduce the velocity of flow. Water passes through a fiber roll while leaving behind the sediment on the uphill side of the roll, thereby reducing sediment erosion.
Limitations: fiber Rolls have several limitations to their uses

1. Fiber rolls may be difficult to move once they become saturated with water.
2. Fiber rolls should not be used on very steep land that is prone to mudslides, landslides or creep.
3. If fiber rolls are not properly staked into the ground, they may be carried away by high flows

2.contour ploughing 

3.sand fencing technique.

4. Stream Aggradation and Degradation are the fluvial processes mostly associated with a river and its differentiating parameters. Aggradation and degradation are generally influenced by river discharge, sediment load, morphological characteristics of river channel and human interventions. If the river water is unable to transfer the bed load or the channel material then the same is deposited within the channel and channel height increases, aggradation occurs. This also leads to change the river morphology and hydraulic geometry. Degradation is another process which is responsible for the lowering of river bed and also shifting the channel banks. In the present paper an attempt is taken to review the processes of aggradation and degradation and their influence on the river channel.

Example- The study found that the godavari delta is at a greater risk as the rate of sediment aggradation (raising the level of the delta through sediment deposition) no longer exceeds relative sea-level rise It further states that the suspended sediment load at the delta has reduced from 150·2 million tons during 1970–1979 to 57·2 million tons by 2000–2006,[12] which translates into a three-fold decline in the past 4 decades. Impacts of this can be seen in destroyed villages like Uppada in Godavari delta,[13] destruction of Mangrove forests and fragmentation of shoreline - possibly a fallout of dam construction.

Cryonics is the science of using ultra-cold temperature to preserve human life with the intent of restoring good health when technology becomes available to do so.

Cryogenic fuels are used in space operations because of the absence of oxygen in space for combustion. So cryonics deals with the preservation of human body parts at very low temperature, whereas cryogenics deals with the study of low level temperatures and how materials behave at low temperatures.

traditional water storage systems like Jal Mandir (Gujarat);

Khatri, Kuhl (H.P.); Zabo (Nagaland); Eri, Ooranis (T.N.); Dongs (Assam); Katas, Bandhas

(Odisha and M.P.) etc. at feasible locations.