Name: What is space and how do we study it? Crash Course Geography #3
Uploaded: 2022-06-03T05:03:33.000Z
Duration: 10 min 26 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

No, I don't mean the part filled with stars and satellites.

This image of the world is letting us see part of geographic space.

The Earth is covered in features and relationships that we can measure and study in a variety

of ways to better understand our environments.

For example, if I were to zoom in to your community, I might measure the space by counting

the buildings to get a sense of how big it is.

But this is your community, so you know where the place to catch up with a neighbor is,

like an eclectic coffee shop or walking the sculpture park.

I only see the physical buildings, while you understand the importance of each building.

We're looking at the space in two different ways.

But there are more ways to discuss space, and they each add a new layer of understanding

-- from measuring it, to defining it, to understanding the relationship between places.

Just as all historians study events in time, based on what's going on or what's normal

for a time period, all geographers study events in space.

No matter the topic, we end up contextualizing places or human-environment interactions based

I'm Alizé Carrère and this is Crash Course Geography.

In geography, we ask questions to understand what is where, why it's there, and how it's

So when we're trying to interpret why glaciers melt or disease outbreaks happen in certain

places, we want to both measure space (to get the “lay of the land” if you will),

and try to understand the significance space has to what's happening.

As geographers, we can think about space in four broad categories that emphasize different

aspects and use a suite of tools and techniques to help us with measuring and understanding

In its simplest form, we can think of space as a container, like a box or an extra-large

Tupperware container for delicious banana bread.

We want to know where stuff is -- basically, what's inside or outside the container.

The Earth is like a stage, and everything from cool rock formations to political protests

Studying space as a container helps us answer the question “what is where?”, by measuring

and locating physical features or borders or boundaries.

To do this, geographers and other people who work with distances and points, like surveyors,

Like overlaying a square grid on the globe.

Even our phones can be used to tell us what is where.

When we open Google Maps on our phones, the phone connects to a Global Positioning System

or GPS, which pinpoints the location of an object on the ground using radio from satellites.

When a receiver on Earth -- like our phones -- receives a radio wave from three or more

satellites, the phone can translate those signals into a precise location, and know

These days all the satellites launched by the US, China, Russia, the EU, India, and

Japan are called the Global Navigation Satellite System.

While it's great to know where things are, as geographers we want to go beyond that.

Even our phones tell us more than just where the sculpture park is.

Once we know where things are in space, we can understand how they're related, or their

In fact, humans are hardwired to think about spatial relationships and how we're related

To describe those spatial relationships, we need to recognize topological space, which

measures and analyzes how the features in space are arranged and connect to each other.

This term comes from the word topology, which refers to how the pieces of something are

We also see topological space in action every time we ask our phones to route us somewhere.

We're really asking Google Maps to look at how our beginning and ending locations

are related and find the most efficient connection based on what's physically in the area.

Spatial analysis is a blend of geography and math that identifies and analyzes those patterns

and relationships in space using a range of techniques including imaging technology, statistics,

To see those spatial patterns, and understand how space changes over time, sometimes it

Remote sensing, or studying something without physically contacting it, is an entire subfield

Photogrammetrists a nd other remote sensing professionals compile

and analyze images from satellites, airplanes, or drones that have sensors that record energy

The reflected energy is sensed by a device that records the wavelength as a number and

turns that number into a pixel in an image.

Remote sensing has been particularly helpful in Antarctica, which is incredibly hard to

Covered in ice and snow, this frigid continent has been one of the least mapped areas on

Antarctica is considered the coldest place on Earth and the windiest.

Conditions are so extreme that hiking around and recording the terrain in a ground-based

So in 1997, researchers collaborated with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency to use

remote sensing satellites with radar capabilities known as Radarsat to scan the surface of Antarctica.

They generated accurate images of the surface ice and snow on Antarctica by measuring the

echo of radio waves sent from a RADAR satellite.

With this data, we can start by defining the boundaries of features in Antarctica, like

the location of large cracks in the ice called crevasses.

We're defining the space, or container, that is this polar continent.

But definitions of any kind are really just the initial building blocks.

In Antarctica, we can use that information to analyze our relationship to those features.

Crevasse zones are dangerous to cross and difficult to see from the ground, so knowing

where they're located can help create safe travel routes.

This can save time and lives when trying to navigate this dangerous terrain.

But our spatial relationships are more than just routes.

The radar dataset is also used to measure how quickly glaciers are moving, which gives

us insight into the physics of glaciers and lets us better predict how glaciers change.

We can build a more complex understanding of a space when we ask not just where is the

crevasse but how is it changing? or where is that ice moving?

Now containers and topology are informative, but they don't let us talk about the more

In geography we can also talk about socially constructed spaces, or those spaces we create

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What is space and how do we study it? Crash Course Geography #3

perceive

perception

physical

effort