Physical Geography
The type of plate boundary where plates slide past each other, as at the San Andreas Fault.
Conservative (transform)
The country with three capitals: Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein
South Africa
The deepest known point in the oceans
Challenger Deep (Mariana Trench)
The flood defence at Woolwich that has protected London since the 1980s
The Thames Barrier
The climate phenomenon that the WMO says is firmly established and set to become a very strong event in the coming months.
El Niño
The atmospheric circulation cell sitting between the Hadley and Polar cells.
Ferrell Cell
The world’s highest capital city, seat of Bolivia’s government.
La Paz
The driest non-polar desert on Earth.
The Atacama
The London borough through which the Prime Meridian passes
Greenwhich
The Turkish city hosting COP31 from 9 to 20 November 2026
Antalya
The force, caused by a dense subducting plate sinking under gravity, now thought to be the main driver of plate motion
Slab pull
The Kazakh capital that was renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019 and changed back in 2022.
Astana
The world’s largest lake by surface area
The Caspian Sea
The “lost” river running beneath Farringdon and joining the Thames at Blackfriars.
The Fleet
The country that ceded its COP31 hosting rights to Türkiye after a long stand-off
Australia
The Serbian scientist whose three orbital cycles (eccentricity, obliquity, precession) help explain glacial periods
Milutin Milankovitch
The purpose-built capital that replaced Yangon in Myanmar.
Naypyidaw
The mountain whose summit is the farthest point from the Earth’s centre.
Chimborazo (Ecuador)
The most easterly point of mainland Britain.
Ness Point, Lowestoft
he Category 5 hurricane that hit Jamaica in October 2025, tying the 1935 Labor Day hurricane as the strongest Atlantic storm at landfall
Hurricane Melissa
The scale that has replaced Richter for measuring earthquake magnitude
Moment magnitude scale
The legislative capital of Sri Lanka (not Colombo)
Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte
The nickname of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the point in the South Pacific farthest from any land
The most northerly inhabited island in the British Isles
Unst (Shetland)
The tropical cyclone that in March 2026 crossed Australia over 11 days, reached Category 4 twice and devastated Exmouth
Tropical Cyclone Narelle