Earth is the third planet from the Sun and the only astronomical object known to harbor life. While large volumes of water can be found throughout the Solar System, only Earth sustains liquid surface water. About 71% of Earth's surface is made up of the ocean, dwarfing Earth's polar ice, lakes, and rivers. The remaining 29% of Earth's surface is land, consisting of continents and islands. Earth's surface layer is formed of several slowly moving tectonic plates, interacting to produce mountain ranges, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Earth's liquid outer core generates the magnetic field that shapes Earth's magnetosphere, deflecting destructive solar winds.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Syrah, also known as Shiraz, is a dark-skinned grape variety grown throughout the world and used primarily to produce red wine. In 1999, Syrah was found to be the offspring of two obscure grapes from southeastern France, Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche. Syrah should not be confused with Petite Sirah, a cross of Syrah with Peloursin dating from 1880.
An inselberg or monadnock is an isolated rock hill, knob, ridge, or small mountain that rises abruptly from a gently sloping or virtually level surrounding plain. In Southern Africa a similar formation of granite is known as a koppie, an Afrikaans word from the Dutch diminutive word kopje. If the inselberg is dome-shaped and formed from granite or gneiss, it can also be called a bornhardt, though not all bornhardts are inselbergs. An inselberg results when a body of rock resistant to erosion, such as granite, occurring within a body of softer rocks, is exposed by differential erosion and lowering of the surrounding landscape.
A savanna or savannah is a mixed woodland-grassland ecosystem characterised by the trees being sufficiently widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to support an unbroken herbaceous layer consisting primarily of grasses. According to Britannica, there exists four savannah forms; savanna woodland where trees and shrubs form a light canopy, tree savanna with scattered trees and shrubs, shrub savanna with distributed shrubs, and grass savanna where trees and shrubs are mostly nonexistent.
Regolith is a blanket of unconsolidated, loose, heterogeneous superficial deposits covering solid rock. It includes dust, broken rocks, and other related materials and is present on Earth, the Moon, Mars, some asteroids, and other terrestrial planets and moons.
John Jamieson Carswell Smart, was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote multiple entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
In historical scholarship, the Socratic problem concerns attempts at reconstructing a historical and philosophical image of Socrates based on the variable, and sometimes contradictory, nature of the existing sources on his life. Scholars rely upon extant sources, such as those of contemporaries like Aristophanes or disciples of Socrates like Plato and Xenophon, for knowing anything about Socrates. However, these sources contain contradictory details of his life, words, and beliefs when taken together. This complicates the attempts at reconstructing the beliefs and philosophical views held by the historical Socrates. It is apparent to scholarship that this problem is now deemed a task seeming impossible to clarify and thus perhaps now classified as unsolvable.
The works of J. R. R. Tolkien have generated a body of research covering many aspects of his fantasy writings, principally The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, along with the large legendarium that remained unpublished on his death in 1973, and the constructed languages that he invented in connection with these, especially the Elvish languages that gave rise to many of the names he used, Quenya and Sindarin. Scholars from different disciplines have examined the linguistic and literary origins of Middle-earth, and have explored many aspects of his writings from Christianity to feminism and race.
Assyrtiko or Asyrtiko is a white Greek wine grape indigenous to the island of Santorini. Assyrtiko is widely planted in the arid volcanic-ash-rich soil of Santorini and other Aegean islands, such as Paros. It is also found on other scattered regions of Greece such as Chalkidiki. Assyrtiko is also being grown by Jim Barry Wines in Clare Valley, South Australia, at the Abbey of New Clairvaux in Northern California since 2011, and at Kefi Winery in Monroe, North Carolina by a first generation Greek family. The original Assyrtiko cuttings were imported in the USA in 1948 by Harold Olmo, grape breeder at the University of California, Davis, where they were stored until the abbey of New Clairvaux took interest in the early 2000s.
Richard John Chorley was an English geographer, and Professor of Geography at Cambridge University, known as leading figure in quantitative geography in the late 20th century, who played an instrumental role in bringing in the use of systems theory to geography.
In archaeology, earthworks are artificial changes in land level, typically made from piles of artificially placed or sculpted rocks and soil. Earthworks can themselves be archaeological features, or they can show features beneath the surface.
A gilgai is a small, ephemeral lake formed from a depression in the soil surface in expanding clay soils. Additionally, the term "gilgai" is used to refer to the overall micro-relief in such areas, consisting of mounds and depressions, not just the lakes themselves. The name comes from an Australian Aboriginal word meaning small water hole. These pools are commonly a few metres across and less than 30 cm (12 in) deep, however in some instances they may be several metres deep and up to 100 m (330 ft) across. Gilgais are found worldwide wherever cracking clay soils and pronounced wet and dry seasons are present. Gilgais are also called "melonholes, crabholes, hogwallows or puff and shelf formations".
A continent is any of several large landmasses. Generally identified by convention rather than any strict criteria, up to seven geographical regions are commonly regarded as continents. Ordered from largest in area to smallest, these seven regions are: Asia, Africa, North America, South America, Antarctica, Europe, and Australia. Variations with fewer continents may merge some of these, for example America, Eurasia, or Afro-Eurasia are sometimes treated as single continents, which can bring the total number as low as four. Zealandia, a largely submerged mass of continental crust, has also been described as a continent.
Dendropithecus is an extinct genus of apes native to East Africa between 20 and 15 million years ago. Dendropithecus was originally suggested to be related to modern gibbons, based primarily on similarities in size, dentition, and skeletal adaptations. However, further studies have shown that Dendropithecus lacks derived hominoid traits. Instead, the traits shared between this taxon and modern primates are primitive for all catarrhines. Dendropithecus is now considered to be a stem catarrhine, too primitive to be closely related to any modern primates.
Laterite is both a soil and a rock type rich in iron and aluminium and is commonly considered to have formed in hot and wet tropical areas. Nearly all laterites are of rusty-red coloration, because of high iron oxide content. They develop by intensive and prolonged weathering of the underlying parent rock, usually when there are conditions of high temperatures and heavy rainfall with alternate wet and dry periods. Tropical weathering (laterization) is a prolonged process of chemical weathering which produces a wide variety in the thickness, grade, chemistry and ore mineralogy of the resulting soils. The majority of the land area containing laterites is between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
The Great Southern wine region is in Western Australia's Great Southern region. It comprises an area 200 kilometres (120 mi) from east to west and over 100 kilometres (62 mi) from north to south, and is Australia's largest wine region.
Land or ground, also known as dry land, is the terrestrial surface of Earth that is not permanently submerged in water, accounting for 29% of Earth's surface. It comprises many islands around the globe, but mainly of four continental landmasses, which are from largest to smallest: Afroeurasia,America, Antarctica and Australia, which are then grouped into continents. The term land encompasses its surface layers ; the biosphere ; its topography as well as its "ecological and hydrological processes." The terrain varies greatly and consists of mountains, deserts, plains, plateaus, and other landforms.
Stuart Dermot Lee is a British specialist in information technology at Oxford University Computing Services and a Reader in E-learning at Oxford University, but is best known for his scholarly books on J. R. R. Tolkien. He is also an award winning playwright.
