World
Geography.

OpeningThe whole Earth in one frame.

No discipline tries to hold more at once. Geography is the science that has to put rocks, climate, water, vegetation, animals and humans on the same map and explain why they sit where they sit.

Begin with the rocks. The continents are not fixed but drifting at fingernail speed on plates of lithosphere; everything else — mountains, oceans, climates, rivers — is downstream of where those plates are now. From climate flows biome; from biome flows soil and the agriculture it supports; from agriculture flows population, cities, states.

This deck is a survey at the largest scale: seven continents, the major plates, the Köppen climate system, the world's biomes, and the GIS instruments that now map all of it in real time.

Chapter IThe seven continents.

The seven-continent model — Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America — is the standard in the English-speaking world and most of Asia. Other models are equally valid: a six-continent Eurasia model is taught in Russia and parts of Europe; a six-continent America model is taught in Latin America and the Romance world.

Asia is the largest at 44.6 million km² and holds 60% of humanity. Africa is second at 30.4M km² but the youngest population. Antarctica is third by area, fifth by area of land above ice, and has no permanent residents. North America, South America, Europe (joined to Asia geologically), and Australia follow.

The continents are not what the eye sees. The Indian subcontinent is a separate plate ramming into Asia. Iceland straddles two plates. New Zealand sits on a submerged eighth continent — Zealandia, recognised by geologists in 2017, 94% under water.

Chapter IIPlate tectonics.

Alfred Wegener proposed continental drift in 1912 from the obvious jigsaw fit of South America and Africa, fossil correlations across oceans, and the matching geology of the Appalachians and Scottish Highlands. He was ridiculed for forty years; he had no mechanism. The mechanism arrived in the 1960s with sea-floor spreading and palaeomagnetism — the symmetric magnetic stripes Vine and Matthews mapped on the Atlantic mid-ocean ridge in 1963.

Earth's lithosphere is broken into seven major plates — African, Antarctic, Eurasian, Indo-Australian, North American, Pacific, South American — and a dozen minor ones. They move 1–10 cm per year on a viscous mantle. Convergent boundaries crumple mountains (Himalayas) or subduct (Pacific Ring of Fire). Divergent boundaries open oceans (the Atlantic, growing 2.5 cm per year). Transform boundaries slide past (the San Andreas Fault).

The geography of every continent is a snapshot of this motion. India struck Asia 50 million years ago and is still pushing the Himalayas up faster than erosion can wear them down.

Chapter IIIPangaea and the deep past.

The current continents are the latest configuration in a long sequence. Pangaea, the supercontinent that assembled around 335 million years ago and broke apart starting 175 Mya, is the most famous, but not the first. Rodinia assembled 1.1 billion years ago. Columbia (or Nuna) preceded it at 1.8 Bya. The cycle of supercontinent assembly and break-up is roughly 500 million years.

Pangaea broke into Laurasia (north) and Gondwana (south). Gondwana fragmented further: South America, Africa, India, Australia, Antarctica all rode away from each other. The marsupials that dominate Australia, the lemurs isolated on Madagascar, and the absence of placentals from Antarctica are all consequences of this break-up.

The next supercontinent — call it Pangaea Ultima or Amasia depending on the model — is forecast to assemble in around 250 million years. Africa will close the Mediterranean and weld to Europe; the Atlantic will keep widening before reversing; Australia will dock with Asia.

Chapter IVThe Köppen system.

Wladimir Köppen's climate classification, first published in 1884 and refined through 1936, is still the working framework. It defines climate by temperature and precipitation thresholds linked to vegetation. The five primary groups, with their letter codes:

A — Tropical: all months above 18 °C. Rainforest (Af), monsoon (Am), savanna (Aw). The Amazon, Congo, Indonesia. B — Arid: evaporation exceeds precipitation. Hot desert (BWh), cold desert (BWk), steppe (BS). The Sahara, Atacama, Gobi. C — Temperate: coldest month between -3 and 18 °C. Mediterranean (Cs), humid subtropical (Cfa), oceanic (Cfb). Most of Europe, the eastern United States, southern China.

D — Continental: coldest month below -3 °C. Hot summer (Dfa) to subarctic (Dfc). Russia, Canada, the American Midwest. E — Polar: warmest month below 10 °C. Tundra (ET), ice cap (EF). The Arctic and Antarctic.

Climate change is moving these boundaries. The arid B zone is expanding; the polar E zone is shrinking; tropical Aw savanna is extending poleward. Updated Köppen maps in 2024 show measurable shifts on every continent.

Chapter VThe world's biomes.

If climate is the input, biome is the output. The Earth has roughly fourteen terrestrial biomes — the classification varies — and each occupies a predictable position relative to latitude, altitude, and rainfall.

Tropical rainforest hugs the equator: 7% of land, more than 50% of species. Tropical savanna rings it where the rainy season is shorter — the African Serengeti, the Brazilian cerrado. Hot desert follows the descending arms of Hadley cells around 30° N and S — the Sahara, the Arabian, the Australian.

Move poleward: Mediterranean shrubland on the western coasts at 30–40° (California, Cape Town, Chile), temperate grassland in continental interiors (the Pampas, the steppes, the prairies), temperate forest in oceanic-influenced midlatitudes, boreal forest (taiga) in a vast band across Russia and Canada, tundra above the Arctic Circle. The pattern repeats with mirror symmetry between hemispheres because the same physics drives both.

Chapter VIThe world ocean.

Earth has one ocean divided by convention into five basins: Pacific (165M km², larger than all the land combined), Atlantic (106M km²), Indian (70M km²), Southern (20M km², ratified as a separate ocean by the IHO in 2000), Arctic (14M km²). Mean depth: 3,688 m. Deepest point: the Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench, 10,935 m.

Ocean circulation is the planet's heat-distribution system. Surface gyres — driven by wind and Coriolis — move warm water poleward (the Gulf Stream, the Kuroshio). Deep water moves the other way: cold dense water sinks at the poles, flows along the bottom, and slowly upwells in the tropics. The whole loop, called the thermohaline circulation or "global conveyor," takes 1,000 years per cycle.

Slowing this conveyor — which appears to be happening as Greenland melt freshens the North Atlantic — is one of the biggest unknowns in climate forecasting. A full collapse would cool northwest Europe and intensify monsoons elsewhere.

Chapter VIIThe atmosphere in three cells.

Air rises at the equator, cools, and falls at 30° latitude. That descending dry air is why the world's great deserts ring the planet at that latitude. The cell — equator-to-30° — is the Hadley cell, named for George Hadley, who described it in 1735.

Two more cells complete the pattern: the Ferrel cell (30°–60°), where air flows poleward at the surface, and the polar cell (60° to pole), where cold air sinks and flows back equatorward. The boundaries between cells host the world's strongest winds — the polar jet stream and the subtropical jet — which steer most weather.

The Coriolis effect — Earth's rotation deflecting moving air — turns these meridional flows into the trade winds, the prevailing westerlies, and the polar easterlies. Together they explain trade routes, monsoons, hurricane tracks, and why London is wet.

Chapter VIIIAsia.

The largest continent, the most populous, and the most varied. From the Arabian Peninsula in the west to the Bering Strait in the east; from the Russian Arctic in the north to Indonesia in the south. The geographic spine is the Himalaya–Karakoram–Pamir–Tian Shan system, raised by the India–Eurasia collision. To its north: the Tibetan Plateau, the Gobi, the Siberian taiga. To its south: the Indo-Gangetic plain and the Indian peninsula.

The continent contains 49 sovereign states and 60% of the world's population — 4.7 billion people. China and India alone have 2.8 billion. The economic centre of gravity has shifted east three times in the last two centuries: from Asia (1820, when China was the largest economy) to Europe (1900) to North America (1950) and now back to Asia (China surpassed the US in PPP terms in 2014).

The monsoon — the seasonal reversal of Indian Ocean winds — is the climatic feature that makes the continent's southern rim habitable at scale. Without it: no Bangladesh, no Indus civilisation, no rice agriculture as we know it.

Chapter IXAfrica.

The second-largest continent and the cradle of Homo sapiens — every non-African human descends from a population that left East Africa around 70,000 years ago. The geography has structure: the Sahara across the north, the Sahel below it, the Congo Basin straddling the equator, the East African Rift running 6,000 km from Mozambique to the Red Sea, the high veldts of the south.

The continent has 54 sovereign states — the most of any continent — and 1.5 billion people, projected to reach 2.5 billion by 2050 and 4 billion by 2100. The median age is 19; the median age in Europe is 44. The "demographic dividend" of the 21st century, if it lands, will land here.

The colonial borders, drawn at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference with no Africans present, are still the borders. The African Union, headquartered in Addis Ababa, has so far refused to redraw them — the alternative would be worse.

Chapter XEurope.

The smallest continent except for Australia, and a peninsula of Asia by every geological criterion — the Eurasian plate is one piece. What makes Europe a continent is cultural and historical, not geographic. Conventionally bounded: Atlantic on the west, Arctic on the north, the Urals and Caspian on the east, the Mediterranean on the south.

The geography is fragmented: the Iberian, Italian, Balkan, and Scandinavian peninsulas; the British Isles, Iceland, the Mediterranean islands; the Alps cutting it east–west; the Pyrenees, Carpathians, Balkans. This fragmentation is the deep reason Europe never unified into a single empire after Rome — the local geographic redoubts always supported a state.

27 EU members today, 750 million people across the broader continent, the highest per-capita GDP region after North America, and the world's densest network of rail, motorway, and aviation infrastructure.

Chapter XIThe Americas.

Two continents joined by the Isthmus of Panama, which closed roughly 3 million years ago — late enough that the resulting Great American Biotic Interchange is still working through the ecology. North American mammals (deer, raccoons, big cats) flooded south; South American forms (opossums, armadillos, hummingbirds) moved north. The South American forms mostly lost.

North America: 24.7M km², dominated by the Canadian Shield in the north, the Great Plains in the middle, the Rockies on the western edge, the Appalachians on the eastern. The Mississippi system drains 40% of the continent. South America: 17.8M km², dominated by the Andes (the longest mountain range on Earth at 7,000 km), the Amazon basin, the Brazilian Highlands, and the Patagonian steppe.

The Americas were the last continents reached by humans — populated from Asia via Beringia between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago — and the last to fall under European colonial rule, with consequences for demography, language and economy that are still working themselves out.

Chapter XIIOceania.

The smallest "continent" by some definitions; not a continent at all by others. The Australian mainland — a single ancient craton that has not moved relative to a hotspot in tens of millions of years — sits at the centre. Around it: New Guinea (the world's second-largest island), New Zealand (geologically the high points of the submerged continent of Zealandia), and the thousands of Pacific islands of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.

The geographic isolation produced one of the most distinctive biota on Earth. Australia's mammals are 70% marsupial and 17% monotreme. New Zealand had no native land mammals at all — the niche was held by birds, including the moa (now extinct) and the kiwi.

The human geography is equally distinctive. The Polynesian voyages of 1200 BCE–1200 CE settled an ocean area larger than all other continents combined, navigating by stars, swells and birds.

Chapter XIIIAntarctica.

The fifth-largest continent, 14 million km², 98% covered by an ice sheet up to 4.8 km thick. Average elevation 2,500 m — the highest continent. Coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth: -89.2 °C at Vostok Station, 21 July 1983. No permanent human population; no native land vertebrates; no trees.

Antarctica was the south pole of Gondwana and was once temperate, with forests that included beech and conifers — fossils are still pulled from the Transantarctic Mountains. The continent moved over the south pole around 35 million years ago and froze over.

The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 (in force 1961) suspended all territorial claims, banned military activity, and reserved the continent for scientific cooperation. Fifty-six states are now party. The treaty is up for review in 2048; the question of mineral exploitation will dominate the negotiation.

Chapter XIVThe mountain systems.

The major orogenies, in rough order of activity: the Alpine–Himalayan belt (still rising as Africa and India ram into Eurasia), the circum-Pacific belt (the Andes, Cascades, Aleutians, Japanese, New Zealand alps), the East African Rift (where Africa is splitting), the older Appalachians and Urals (Palaeozoic remnants).

The world's fourteen eight-thousanders — peaks above 8,000 metres — are all in the Himalaya–Karakoram. Mount Everest at 8,849 m is the highest from sea level; Chimborazo in Ecuador is highest from Earth's centre because of the equatorial bulge; Mauna Kea is highest from base if you count the underwater portion.

Mountains create vertical climate zones — the same Köppen sequence you get from equator to pole, compressed into a few thousand metres of altitude. They also wring rainfall out of moving air masses (the orographic effect) and produce rain shadows on their leeward sides.

Chapter XVThe world's rivers.

The longest, ranked: the Nile at 6,650 km, the Amazon at 6,400 km (or longer; the source is contested), the Yangtze at 6,300 km, the Mississippi–Missouri at 6,275 km, the Yenisei at 5,539 km. The Amazon carries by far the most water — 209,000 m³/s at the mouth, more than the next seven rivers combined.

Civilisation began on rivers: the Nile, the Tigris–Euphrates, the Indus, the Yellow. Annual flooding deposited fresh silt; the river provided water and transport. The first cities, the first writing, the first state-level agriculture all happened in valley floodplains.

The 20th century re-engineered most of the world's major rivers with dams. The Three Gorges (Yangtze), the Aswan High (Nile), the Itaipu (Paraná), the Hoover (Colorado). The benefits — flood control, hydropower, irrigation — came with measurable downstream costs in fisheries, sediment delivery, and delta subsidence.

Chapter XVIWhere the people are.

8.1 billion humans in 2026, projected to peak around 10.3 billion in the 2080s, then decline. The distribution is wildly uneven. Two clusters dominate: East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, around 1.6 billion) and South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, around 2 billion). Together they hold 45% of humanity on 8% of the land.

The Valeriepieris circle — a circle of radius 4,100 km centred on the South China Sea — contains more than half the world's population. The fact has been re-derived several times; it is true regardless of who first noticed it.

Empty spaces: the Sahara, the Arabian Empty Quarter, the Tibetan Plateau, the Russian Far East, the Australian outback, the Canadian Shield, the Amazon interior. Roughly 75% of humans live on 10% of the land. This concentration is intensifying as the world urbanises.

Chapter XVIIThe urban planet.

In 1800, around 7% of humans lived in cities. In 1900, 14%. In 1950, 30%. In 2008, the world crossed 50%. By 2050, the UN projects 68%. The 21st century is the century in which humanity finished moving to the city.

The largest urban agglomerations in 2026: Tokyo (37M), Delhi (33M), Shanghai (29M), Dhaka (24M), São Paulo (23M), Cairo (23M), Mexico City (22M), Beijing (22M), Mumbai (21M), Osaka (19M). Lagos is climbing fastest and will likely top the table by 2050.

Urbanisation correlates with falling fertility, rising literacy, female workforce participation, and per-capita energy use. It is the single best lever for human development; it is also the single biggest source of climate emissions. The two facts have to be reconciled and so far have not been.

Chapter XVIIISovereign states.

The UN recognises 193 member states plus 2 observers (the Holy See and Palestine). A handful of widely-recognised but non-UN states (Taiwan, Kosovo) and a longer list of de facto states (Somaliland, Transnistria, Northern Cyprus) bring the practical count to around 200.

The borders are not natural. Most were drawn in the late 19th and early 20th century by colonial powers (the Berlin Conference for Africa; Sykes–Picot for the Middle East; the Durand Line for Afghanistan–Pakistan; the McMahon Line for India–China). Many cut through ethnic groups; many enclose ethnic groups that would prefer different lines. The world's recurring conflicts are clustered along these inherited lines.

The 20th-century settlement — sovereignty is inviolable; borders cannot be changed by force — has held more or less since 1945, with conspicuous exceptions: South Sudan (2011, peaceful), Crimea (2014, by force), and the contested borders that produced the 2022 war in Ukraine.

Chapter XIXThe map and the territory.

Every flat map of a round Earth lies. Mercator (1569), designed for sailors because rhumb lines come out as straight lines, exaggerates polar areas — Greenland appears as large as Africa and is 14 times smaller. Gall–Peters (1855/1973), an equal-area projection, restores the relative sizes but distorts shape grotesquely. Robinson (1963) splits the difference, used by National Geographic 1988–98. Winkel tripel (1921) replaced it as their standard from 1998.

For map-and-globe at scale: Dymaxion (Buckminster Fuller, 1943) projects onto an icosahedron and unfolds with minimal distortion. AuthaGraph (Hajime Narukawa, 1999) is the standard in Japanese schools and shows the world as a continuous tetrahedral net.

The point is that "north up" is a convention dating to Ptolemy. South-up and east-up maps were standard in much of medieval Europe and the Islamic world. Maps are arguments.

Chapter XXLatitude and longitude.

Latitude is easy and has been since antiquity — the angle of the noon sun or Polaris above the horizon gives it directly. Longitude requires comparing local time to the time at a reference meridian, which requires a portable accurate clock. The Longitude Act of 1714 offered £20,000 for a clock that could keep time to within half a degree on a transatlantic voyage; John Harrison's H4 chronometer of 1761 met the standard.

The prime meridian was set at Greenwich by international agreement at Washington in 1884 — a political choice as much as a technical one. The metre, defined in 1791 as one ten-millionth of the distance from equator to pole through Paris, made France's claim. The British, who already had Greenwich Observatory and the world's busiest shipping fleet, won.

The system is now realised by the WGS-84 datum, the GPS reference frame: a geocentric ellipsoid with a defined origin and orientation. Every modern device that knows where it is locates itself in WGS-84.

Chapter XXIGIS and remote sensing.

Geographic Information Systems were invented in 1962 by Roger Tomlinson at the Canada Land Inventory. The idea was to layer thematic maps — soils, vegetation, agriculture, transport — and query them. ESRI's ArcGIS, founded 1969, became the dominant commercial platform; QGIS (open-source, 2002) is the major free alternative.

Remote sensing — satellite imagery — became routine with Landsat 1 in 1972. The Landsat archive, free since 2008, provides 50+ years of continuous global imagery. Sentinel (ESA, since 2014) added higher resolution and faster revisit. Planet (commercial, since 2014) operates a constellation of 200+ small satellites that image the entire landmass daily.

The combination of GPS, satellite imagery and computational GIS is the most consequential change in geography since the invention of the projection. Every road, every field, every building footprint, every forest is now mapped at sub-metre resolution and updated weekly.

Chapter XXIIClimate change is geography change.

Atmospheric CO₂ in 1850: 285 ppm. In 2026: about 425 ppm and climbing roughly 2.5 ppm per year. Global mean surface temperature is now 1.4 °C above the pre-industrial baseline. The Arctic has warmed nearly four times the global average; the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass measurably; the world's glaciers are in retreat almost everywhere.

The geographic consequences are not symmetric. Some places are getting hotter and drier (the Mediterranean, the American Southwest, southern Africa, eastern Australia). Some are getting hotter and wetter (the high latitudes, the monsoon regions). Some are getting more variable both ways (most of the rest).

Sea level rose 8 inches in the 20th century. The mid-range projection for 2100 is another 0.5–1.0 m, with tails to 2 m if the marine ice cliff instability hypothesis turns out to be right. That is enough to displace a tenth of humanity and to redraw the coastline of every continent.

Chapter XXIIIThe resource map.

Geography determines resources. The world's oil sits mostly in the Middle East (Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, UAE, Kuwait), Russia, Venezuela, and the U.S. shale basins. Natural gas follows a similar map with Russia, Iran and Qatar holding the largest reserves. Coal is widely distributed but concentrated in China, the U.S., India, and Australia.

Critical minerals: lithium (Australia, Chile, Argentina, China), cobalt (DR Congo, two-thirds of supply), nickel (Indonesia, Philippines), rare earths (China, ~70% of mining and ~85% of refining). The mineral map of the energy transition does not look like the oil map; the geopolitical implications are still working through.

Fresh water is the resource most at risk. Per-capita water availability has fallen by half globally since 1960 as population doubled. Nine countries now hold 60% of renewable freshwater — Brazil, Russia, Canada, Indonesia, China, Colombia, the U.S., Peru and India. The Middle East and North Africa have effectively run out and are now mining fossil aquifers.

Chapter XXIVThe geography of trade.

Globalisation runs on ships. 90% of the volume of world trade moves by sea. The major chokepoints — the Strait of Hormuz (a third of seaborne oil), the Strait of Malacca (a quarter of seaborne trade), the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Bosphorus, the Bab-el-Mandeb — are the most strategic spaces on the planet.

The shipping geography has changed. The Northern Sea Route across the Russian Arctic, ice-free for much of the year by the 2030s, will compete with Suez for Asia–Europe traffic. The Panama Canal, struggling with drought-induced low water in Lake Gatún since 2023, is operating at reduced capacity. China's Belt and Road Initiative, announced 2013, has built ports, rail and pipelines across Eurasia and Africa to reroute trade.

The container — invented by Malcom McLean in 1956 — collapsed shipping costs by an order of magnitude and made the geography of production global. Today's "factory Asia" — the Pearl River Delta, Vietnam, Bangladesh — exists because of that single innovation.

Chapter XXVLanguages, religions, foodways.

About 7,150 living languages (Ethnologue 2024). Half are spoken by fewer than 10,000 people; a third are endangered. The largest by native speakers: Mandarin (940M), Spanish (485M), English (380M), Hindi (345M), Arabic (310M), Bengali (235M), Portuguese (235M). The largest second-language language is English (1.5B total speakers).

Religions: Christianity (2.4B, mostly Catholic and Protestant), Islam (1.9B, mostly Sunni), Hinduism (1.2B), Buddhism (520M). The fastest-growing major religion is Islam, partly demography, partly conversion in sub-Saharan Africa. The fastest-growing affiliation overall is "none" — secularism — particularly in East Asia and the West.

Foodways map onto staple crops and onto historical exchange. The Columbian Exchange (1492 onwards) reshaped global cuisine: tomatoes to Italy, potatoes to Ireland, chillies to India, maize to Africa, coffee to Latin America, sugar to the Caribbean. There is no traditional Italian cuisine before 1492.

Chapter XXVIThe hazards map.

The Earth is alive and dangerous. Subduction zones produce the largest earthquakes — the Cascadia (last major rupture 1700), the Sumatra–Andaman (2004, M9.1), the Tōhoku (2011, M9.1). Volcanic arcs sit above subduction zones — the Pacific Ring of Fire holds 75% of the world's active volcanoes.

Tropical cyclones — hurricanes in the Atlantic, typhoons in the western Pacific, cyclones elsewhere — concentrate in coastal bands between 5° and 30° latitude. The deadliest single storm in modern record killed 300,000+ in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in November 1970.

The hazards are predictable in location and probability if not in timing. Earthquake-resistant building codes, tsunami warning systems, hurricane evacuation plans and storm-surge barriers are the difference between a hazard and a disaster. Japan rides earthquakes; Haiti gets levelled by them. The geography of vulnerability matters more than the geography of hazard.

Chapter XXVIIThe travel century.

International tourist arrivals: 25 million in 1950; 277 million in 1980; 940 million in 2010; 1.5 billion in 2019; bottomed at 400M in 2020 (COVID); back to 1.4 billion by 2024. The most-visited countries: France (~90M annually), Spain, the U.S., China, Italy. The most-visited city: Bangkok. The most-visited single attraction: the Forbidden City in Beijing.

The carbon arithmetic of travel is unforgiving. A round-trip transatlantic flight emits roughly 1.6 tonnes of CO₂ per passenger — nearly the entire annual sustainable budget for one person under any 2 °C-compatible scenario. Aviation is currently 2.5% of global emissions and roughly 4% of human-caused warming when the radiative-forcing multiplier from contrails is included.

Land travel — high-speed rail in particular — is an order of magnitude better. China built 45,000 km of HSR in twenty years; Europe has 11,000 km; the U.S. has 700 km. The geography of travel will look different in 2050.

Chapter XXVIIIA geography shelf.

• 1864Man and NatureG. P. Marsh
• 1948The MediterraneanBraudel
• 1969The Necessity for RuinsJ. B. Jackson
• 1976The Selfish Gene (geographic readings)Dawkins
• 1997Guns, Germs, and SteelDiamond
• 2003The Earth: An Intimate HistoryFortey
• 2005CollapseDiamond
• 2008Travels in the Greater YellowstoneTurner
• 2009The Great Sea — MediterraneanAbulafia
• 2012Why Nations FailAcemoglu & Robinson
• 2012The Revenge of GeographyKaplan
• 2014The Sixth ExtinctionKolbert
• 2015Prisoners of GeographyMarshall
• 2016ConnectographyKhanna
• 2017Origins — How Earth Made UsDartnell
• 2017The SonglinesChatwin
• 2019The Future EarthBessette & Foley
• 2019The Uninhabitable EarthWallace-Wells
• 2020UnderlandMacfarlane
• 2021The Power of GeographyMarshall
• 2022The End of the World Is Just the BeginningZeihan
• 2023Atlas of the InvisibleCheshire & Uberti
• 2024Move — climate migrationVince

Chapter XXIXWatch & read.

↑ 4.5 Billion Years of Shifting Continents · full documentary

More on YouTube

Watch · A Google Earth fly-through of the planet
Watch · Plate tectonics, animated and explained

And on the page

Read Tim Marshall's Prisoners of Geography first if you want a single book; read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel for the deep-time argument. Lewis Dartnell's Origins is the best one-volume account of how the planet shaped human history. Then walk the world in Robert Macfarlane's company.