Physical Geography—The Global Environment

Build the course you want to teach.
Well known for its flexibility, clarity of presentation, and graphic excellence, Physical Geography: The Global Environment, Fourth Edition, provides a thorough, scientifically authoritative, accessible, and geographic view into Earth's physical systems.
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
Flexible structure: Fifty short, self-contained units make the material in the text easier for students to understand and provide instructors with maximum flexibility in assigning readings, rearranging the order in which materials are taught, and customizing content.
Accessible presentation: Written by four scholars--each with decades of successful teaching and writing experience--the book presents complex topics in clear, student-friendly language.
Affordable price: Oxford University Press USA, a department of the University of Oxford, is a not-for-profit publisher devoted to furthering the university's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Since accessible materials clearly support this mission, OUP USA uses a combination of not-for-profit status and financial discipline to offer course materials that generally cost students significantly less than those offered by commercial publishers.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
New authors--James E. Burt and Joseph A. Mason: As practicing teachers and researchers with decades of experience in the classroom and in the field, this new author team draws on deep, personal experience and expertise in all aspects of physical geography teaching, research, and authorship.
New units on climate change: This edition features completely revamped coverage of climate change, with Unit18 covering natural change and Unit19 focusing on human-induced change.
Updated science: Descriptions and explanations have been methodically evaluated for accuracy, completeness, and currency. There is also expanded coverage of the science behind the greenhouse effect, the global carbon cycle, and other key topics.
SUPPORT PACKAGE (www.oup.com/us/deblij)
Physical Geography, Fourth Edition, is supported by an extensive and carefully produced supplements program, providing everything instructors need to prepare, present, and assess progress in their course in one easy-to-use package. The package includes:
Oxford University Press Animation Series: The authors have worked with leading animators to produce clear, dramatic, and illustrative animations and visualizations of some of the most important concepts in physical geography.
Digital Images and PowerPoint Presentations: All of the animations from the Oxford University Press Animation Series, all of the images from the text, and several animations and visualizations from other sources are available to instructors, pre-inserted into PowerPoint. In addition, our ancillary author team has created lecture outlines, arranged by unit, in PowerPoint.
Test Questions and Testing Software: Written by experienced professors and answerable directly from the text, these test questions provide instructors with a useful tool for creating and administering tests.
Animation and Visualization Exercises: Fun and interactive, these computer-graded exercises allow students to explore physical geography through a series of engaging, hands-on activities.
Review Questions: Available for each unitof the book, these computer-graded review questions can be assigned as homework--or used by students for self-review.
Lab Manual: Specifically designed to accompany the textbook, this affordable resource includes twenty concise labs. (978-0-19-985962-7)
Oxford Homework Online: Simple, intuitive, and mobile, this online resource puts the entire teaching and learning package in one place.* With assignment and assessment results flowing into a straightforward, interactive gradebook, the nationally hosted online learning course gives instructors a clear view into students' progress. And the system works on every major platform and device--including mobile devices! (www.oup.com/us/deblij)
* Website does not include the Lab Manual.

H. J. de Blij
John A. Hannah Professor of Geography, Michigan State University
An undergraduate course in physical geography was Harm de Blij's eye-opener. As a graduate student, he conducted field research in the Swaziland (Africa) Lowveld, working on the hypothesis that this 120-kilometer-long, steep-sided valley might be a southern spur of the great East African rift valley system (PhD, Northwestern University). Since then he has addressed topics ranging from continental drift to climate change and from heat summation in viticulture to rogue waves in oceans. His more than thirty books include technical, text, and trade titles and have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Italian, and other languages. In the media he vigorously promotes geography as indispensable to education, decision-making, and domestic and foreign policy formulation.

Peter O. Muller
Professor of Geography and Regional Studies, University of Miami
Peter O. Muller's many works include The World Today: Concepts and Regions in Geography, Sixth Edition (2012); Geography: Realms, Regions, and Concepts, Fifteenth Edition (2011); and Economic Geography, Third Edition (1998). Dr. Muller's articles have appeared in numerous journals including The Professional Geographer, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and American Quarterly. His research interests focus on the changing geography of the United States, particularly new forms of suburbanization. He is coeditor of the journal Urban Geography, and has also served as academic production consultant for the original Annenberg/Corporation of Public Broadcasting video series, The Power of Place.

James E. Burt
Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
The author of two textbooks--Understanding Weather and Climate, Sixth Edition (2012), and Elementary Statistics for Geographers, Third Edition (2009)--James E. Burt is the recipient of numerous awards for excellence in teaching, textbook authorship, and courseware development. Dr. Burt's graduate training was in climatology and quantitative spatial analysis, and he has long had research interests located at the intersection of physical geography and geographic information science. His current research projects revolve around expert systems modeling of the physical environment and knowledge discovery methods for geospatial data.

Joseph A. Mason
Professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Joseph A. Mason has published dozens of publications and reports both as a faculty member and as a member of Nebraska's Conservation and Survey Division. An active teacher, he has taught a broad array of courses at the college and graduate level. Dr. Mason's research centers on eolian and hillslope geomorphology; loess stratigraphy/ sedimentology; pedology and soil geomorphology; paleopedology; Quaternary landscape evolution; and geomorphic response to Quaternary climate change, with a geographic focus on the Great Plains, northern China, the central Rocky Mountains, and the Upper Mississippi Valley.