Geraldine Boh

Reflection for 30/1/2009 Geography Lesson

The atmosphere is essential for life. It blocks out harmful UV rays from the sun, burns out meteorites, provide oxygen, and keeps the earth warm. And yet, it occasionally destroys life. Most weather occurs in the troposphere, and the effect of some weather condition can be fatal, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones, floods, which kills many in its path. How ironic. The atmosphere supports and yet destroys life. The atmosphere can be deadly, and yet, there are its beautiful moments, as we saw on the video today, the auroras and waveclouds. I suppose this is life. Nothing is certain or perfect.
Our atmosphere is akin to a giant 'ocean' , shaping our landforms, our country, and our people subsequently. It amazes me how everything is connected, not only within the atmospheric system, but also eventually, with other factors outside of it. Although this was not exactly touched upon during geography lesson, inspiration was brought forth by the term 'systems' that were mentioned so very often, and it dawned upon me sometime today.
Its like, within the atmosphere, the weather will occur in the troposphere, will shape the land through wind or water erosion, and subsequently the shape of the land will affect whether people can survive in that land area, and then how the people will live there, while at the same time the other parts of the atmosphere ensure that we have sufficient heat, oxygen, and carbon dioxide for plants to photosynthesise, and for us to have food to eat.
For example, the weather and temperature of the earth is distributed in such a way that it is cold and snows in antartica, but not cold enough such that life is impossible. The people who live near the poles (eskimos i think) are then shaped by our weather and distribution of heat (both are systems), they fish for food, adapt in the cold, wear thick coats, and because of the weather, they even have a language that is mostly revolved around how they live. The weather affects the land(systems are involved here), which affects the people living there, and should they use aerosols or contribute to the greenhouse effect (another system) , would affect the weather again.
It seems like the entire atmosphere, the entire earth, revolves around us humans. Or is it rather that we self centered creatures percieve them as revolving around us? The whole system is just so intricately designed, and they just fit so nicely together, large and interconnected, that sometimes its hard to tell which factor influences which exactly.
Everything belongs to a system, which in turn is interconnected to other systems in some way or another, which makes up our earth. The beauty of systems, indeed.

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