Today we're going to talk about SPAAAAAACE, but not like stars and satellites and stuff. Instead, we're going to talk about geographic space. In geography, we can look at the world and the places and spaces we inhabit with four distinct lenses: space as a container, topologically, socially, and how we perceive it. On this journey, we'll make stops in Antarctica, Haiti, and China as we introduce the tools you'll need from surveying and remote sensing to community-created maps to help us better understand and navigate our world.

There's an invisible force shaping our lives, affecting the weather, climate, land, economy, and just whether a flag looks majestic or not - we're talking about the wind! Today we’re going to go into the science of where the wind comes from and take a closer look at the major wind systems and pressure belts across the globe. We'll explain how the Coriolis effect causes the winds to curve (and makes air travel a bit more complicated), explore the doldrums and horse latitudes that could stall ships for days, and show the enormous impact the trade winds had on European colonization of the Americas.

People have been migrating and transplanting since before recorded history, and understanding the reasons why people migrate can help explain some of the cultural, economic, and political patterns we see around the world. Today, we’re going to mostly focus on the Indian diaspora, which is the largest in the world with over 18 million people of Indian descent living outside of India. And through this lens, we’ll teach you about many different types of voluntary and involuntary migration throughout history and around the world.

Today we're going to talk about how and why floods happen both in spite of, and because of, us. Specifically, we'll take a closer look at the island of Java, and its largest city, Jakarta, and explain the factors that lead to serious flooding almost annually. We'll also show you how mangroves can help protect us from flooding, and how wetlands along floodplains act like the kidneys of the Earth filtering out impurities and pollutants.

According to the UN, people living in urban places now outnumber those in rural areas — which is a pretty new phenomenon for many parts of the world. So today, we’re going to discuss factors that have led to this shift in populations from rural to urban residences (known as urbanization), and we’ll examine the historical and structural systems, like colonialism and Central Place Theory, that have influenced the cities we see today.

Correction:
On the map here we incorrectly placed the Shanghai marker where Guangzhou is located.

Food insecurity, or the lack of access to enough nutritious food, is a complex problem. In the 21st century, even with all of our advances in technology, access to food is still uneven. Today we're going to look at the diffusion of food across the globe during the Columbian Exchange and examine how changes in food technology from the Agricultural Revolution to the Green Revolution to the Genetic Revolution have played a significant part in food availability across the globe.