Geo

Everyone and Everything have to be Someplace

In Geographic Frontiers, I write about geography. It doesn't just impact our world.
It is our world.
Geography is so intermeshed with our daily lives, we often overlook it.

My purpose in this blog is to explore our geography affects current events and impacted history. I explore how technology helps us navigate through this world and how geography in turn affects the technology we rely on.

Geography provides understanding of where we—and our things—are located
and helps us make sense of what is going on around us.

My current blog is below. To see archived blogs, select "Arcives" at the top of the page.
Please email your comments to me, Jon Lewis, at j.lewis@geographic-frontiers.com

March 5, 2025

Geography, Newtonian Physics and Clausewitz
Thinking of Geography as Fiction

If geography is the “mother of all sciences(1),” then physics is an offspring that has grown up and taken on a life of its own. Perhaps it is time for the offspring to provide some illumination to its parent.

Isaac Newton’s three laws of motion were first published in 1687 in his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.(2) Newton’s laws became the touchstone of physics for over two centuries until Einstein’s relativity theories overtook them in the 20th century. Newton’s first law of motion states that an object will keep moving (or remain at rest) unless it is acted upon by a force.(3)   Newton did not emphasize friction in his generative work—he was more focused on gravity and its effect on the movement of the planets--but friction quickly became associated as one of the forces impacting the motion described in his laws.(4)   In Newtonian physics, things naturally move. Friction is what slows things down.

In our world of internet connectivity, global supply chains and ubiquitous mobility, we don’t think about something as staid as geography slowing us down. Perhaps we should. We may like to think—like Newton’s laws—things move unimpeded. The reality is—whether we like or not—geography slows things down. It creates friction.

We don’t yet have the technology to negate this geographic friction. We can’t float along like electromagnetic energy. We would need to create that energy on the earth to begin with. We don’t know how to convert physical goods to energy and teleport them around the globe. Every object currently floating in space started its journey from a specific point on the earth’s surface.

We are still very much tied to planet earth. We need to better understand the earth and the “friction” it inherently causes. We must factor this into our understanding of our global networks and how they operate.

The military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz(5), took the physics concept of friction and applied it to warfare. For Clausewitz, friction was a component of the “fog of war.” Unlike the friction of physics that could be isolated and calculated, friction could be widespread, impossible to calculate and related to chance.(6) It made the apparently easy difficult. For Clausewitz, friction could not be overcome, only anticipated.

To carry the warfare analogy a bit further (and perhaps--in the opinion of some readers—too far) mankind has long been at war with geography. In antiquity, it began with paths and trails, then roads and shipping routes that followed coastlines. Roads became highways. Shipping routes branched out across oceans. Railroads and flight paths were added. Overland and undersea communication networks were initiated and grew to coordinate all the movement. These actions were an effort to tame the geography that stood in the way of where we were to where we wanted to be. And it wasn’t only us. We came to want goods that grew or were made in one place moved to where we lived. We wanted information to be available instantly anywhere.

I believe the concept of geographic friction most is useful if defined as an amalgamation of friction of physics (Newton) and the friction of war (Clausewitz). We can’t count on people and things moving effortlessly over or through the geography of the world. As with physics, geography can slow things down. Its impact must be analyzed and calculated. It cannot be simply waved away as inconsequential. Like the weather, there are some things about geography that are so complex that outcomes appear to be left to chance. I’m not taking a pessimistic view that Clausewitz did in his concept of friction in war. However, like Clausewitz, I think geographic friction must be anticipated even when there are times it cannot be fully calculated. Even in uncertainty, anticipation can lead to an analysis of likely alternatives should geographic friction stand in our way.

We must not make war with geography. We instead must come to peace with it. Like former combatants, this will at times be an uneasy peace. We must seek to understand things from the perspective of geography. We can then move forward with initiatives and policies that help us, understanding what the geography dictates and what it can provide.

Here are some examples of where geography creates friction for things we normally think of as frictionless.

Artificial Intelligence and the Internet

Artificial Intelligence has to come from somewhere.   It relies on data centers and data centers require space and power to run them.(7) This leads to a number of geographical considerations in deciding where to locate data centers. Access to cheap power sources is a prime consideration. For example, Apple bought a nearby hydroelectric plant to power the data center it built in Prineville, Oregon, nearly a decade ago. As the data center expanded, Apple added a wind farm and a solar project into the mix. Companies don’t always build their own power sources, but they are looking for locations where utility providers can demonstrate access to cheap and scalable power.

Connectivity to robust fiber and data communications infrastructure is also important. This would tend toward data centers being placed close to population centers where this infrastructure is most likely to exist. This also places data centers near markets where companies and customers are likely to need data centers.

A jurisdiction’s willingness to offer tax and economic incentives to bring in a potential source for employment and economic growth is also important factor. In this regard, data centers aren’t that different for professional sports teams. They’re more likely to move to a community that will offer them incentives to do so.

Added to this are ancillary considerations such as avoiding areas prone to natural disasters (think hurricanes, earthquakes or wildfires) and being in temperate climates where power requirements for cooling will not be as onerous.

So, where does the friction come in?   Data centers take up a lot of land that could be used for housing, particularly in metropolitan regions experiencing housing shortages. Their ever-growing demand for power can push up against what local utilities can provide.(8)   AI is powered by data centers and data centers must be located somewhere. There will be an on-going push and pull (friction) between places expecting to reap economic benefits to those that say, “enough is enough.”

The federal government has even decided to get in on the act. On January 14, 2025, then President Biden signed an executive order opening up Department of Defense and Department of Energy land to the development of data centers. The catch is those building the facilities must bring online sufficient clean energy generation resources to match the full electricity needs of their data centers. It will be interesting to see if the “friction” of working through federal requirements will overcome the offer of “free land.”

We all experience some degree of friction when using the internet in our mobile society. Despite how extensive cell phone service providers claim their coverage maps to be, I always seem to find the spot where one or two bars means my internet access will be slow to nonexistent. The often happens in the back of a store when I want to check a price or a review of a certain item.   We don’t necessarily make the connection to geography, but our mobile internet connectivity depends on where our carrier has been able to place a cell tower.

Damage to undersea cables has recently received increased attention. Telecommunication companies along with military planners have long appreciated the effects sabotage or acts of war could have on networks that rely on undersea cables. In early 2024, three telecommunications cables were severed in the Red Sea probably because of the anchor of a cargo ship sunk by Houthi Militants.
Chinese-owned vessels have been accused of cutting underseas cables near Taiwan. Both Chinese and Russian associated vessels are under suspicion for cutting cables in the Baltic Sea. At least 11 Baltic cables have been damaged since October 2023. It’s not easy to determine how many of these might be deliberate sabotage as opposed to anchors being dragged by poorly maintained or poorly crewed ships. Due to redundancies, there have been minimal service disruptions. Nevertheless, NATO countries are deploying an increased number of warships, maritime patrol aircraft and naval drones to provide enhanced surveillance and deterrence in the Baltic region.

Sabotage does not appear to be the cause of a major disruption to internet traffic off the coast of western Africa in March 2024. Four major cables were cut, adversely affecting connectivity for thirteen West African countries reaching as far as Namibia and South Africa. An underwater rockslide of the coast of Cote d’Ivoire was the suspected culprit. The ocean bottom does not always present a passive, stable geomorphology. This clearly falls with the Clausewitz definition of friction. It took several days to re-route traffic along other paths and latency issues persisted for data traveling outside of Africa. It took upwards of two months for all four cables to be repaired.

Will satellites provide the answer? Not anytime soon. “If you put together all the capacity from Starlink, Amazon Kuiper, and other new satellite constellations, they would still account for less than one-tenth the capacity of a single, modern fiber-optic undersea cable.”(9)

Another area of geographic friction is internet access in rural areas. Not everyone who lives “off-the-grid” wants to remain that way. The reason for this digital divide is straightforward. Broadband infrastructure—especially fiber--is expensive to build out.   Internet service providers are reluctant to invest in building out broadband in areas where their investment won’t be returned. Hence, they focus on more densely populated areas.   In the United States, this lack of rural access averages out to around 5% nationwide to around 20% in some states. Regionally, states in the South have the highest percentage of homes without internet access. Much like rural electrification 90 years ago, the federal government has some programs to subsidize the buildout of networks into rural areas. Until this buildout is complete, some in rural areas will need to continue to rely on their own intelligence rather than anything artificial. There will be some in Gen Z (and maybe even in Gen A) who will remember the day they got internet access in their homes just as their great-grandfathers could remember the day electricity came to the farm.

Space Services

Outer space is not immune from the concept of geographic friction. Only two launch facilities—one in Florida(10) and one in California can handle most U.S. rocket launches, particularly orbital launches. As demand increases, they will only get busier and wait times for launches could increase for certain size payloads even as commercial launch companies become more efficient.

Each location, Cape Canaveral in Florida and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, combine to support military, government civilian and commercial space launches.

Unlike data centers which tend to be located inland away from potential coastal weather hazards, space launch facilities need to be on the coast so any launch related debris lands in the water.(11) Orbital launch sites are generally built closer to the equator to take advantage of the additional thrust provided by the Earth. A further geographic limitation is that only Vandenberg can support polar launches (south-to-north) important to some communication, intelligence and remote sensing satellites. This is because the coast of California extends about 125 miles to the west from the Los Angeles metropolitan area providing space to safely launch rockets to the south, something that cannot be done from Cape Canaveral.(12)
Several coastal launch sites are being added to the mix to alleviate potential crowding at the main sites. The newer sites have had a mixed record.

SpaceX’s Starbase has attained the most notoriety. The facility is located in south Texas on the Gulf of Mexico, near the border with Mexico. It has been used for test flights of the SpaceX heavy lift Starship rocket designed for future interplanetary missions. SpaceX’s intent is to use the facility for future operational launches of the Starship rocket even as it looks to Cape Canaveral for near-term launches into orbit. Any future transition of operational launches to the Texas site took a step backward on January 26, 2025, when a SpaceX Starship broke up during a test flight about eight and a half minutes after launch. Several airlines delayed or diverted aircraft in the Caribbean as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) initiated a Debris Response Area. The FAA has frozen further launches from the facility pending a review. SpaceX received no reports of injuries or property damage, although the rocket failure provided some stunning images.   In April 2023, environment groups and a Texas tribe sued the FAA saying it did not conduct an adequate review prior to a failed SpaceX test launch. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported a debris cloud from the April 2023 launch containing pulverized concrete spread as far as 6.5 miles north of the launch pad, and a 3.5-acre fire started south of the pad site on Boca Chica State Park land.

Alaska supported the establishment of the Pacific Spaceport Complex on Kodiak Island via its Alaska Aerospace Company. It trades of its distant location in the northern latitudes with its ability to conduct polar launches. Much of their work has been in suborbital missile defense systems to include one developed by the Israelis. Of the slightly over 30 launches it has conducted since its start-up in 1998, less than a third have been orbital. With only a few launches occurring every year, it is still a very much a part time operation.

Wallops Island, a NASA owned facility on the Delmarva peninsula near Virginia’s Chincoteague Island, also sees sub-orbital launches as their mainstay even though they can and have supported orbital launches to include International space station resupply missions. Like the launch facilities in California and Florida, Wallops Island has existed as a government launch facility for a long time—since World War II. Not to be outdone by Alaska, Virginia and Maryland joined to build the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops on land leased from NASA. In December 2006, the facility made its first launch and has done about the same number of launches as its Alaska counterpart, but in a shorter amount of time. It also shows a stronger, more certain list of future space launches.

There are a number of launch facilities around the world, but most are out-of-reach to the United States due to geopolitical considerations since they are located in Russia and China.(13)   The one closest to the United States is in French Guiana in northern South America. It also has the advantage of being located on the equator which means not as much fuel is needed to get a payload into orbit. It is the primary launch facility for the European Space Agency. Japan and India also have their own space launch facilities. While there are exceptions, most counties (or regions in the case of Europe) tend to want their own space launch facilities since they are tied to some extent to national prestige and security. There is no significant movement toward the globalization of space launch.

An increasing area of space and geographic friction has been GSP spoofing. This has been occurring more frequently in aircraft flying in the general vicinity of conflict zones as adversaries see jamming or spoofing GPS signals as a way to counter the drone threat.(14)   Pilots are trained to rely on back-up systems when they suspect a problem, but this could be overlooked in a busy cockpit especially if another in-flight incident is occurring. In 1983, a Soviet Union aircraft shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 after it violated Soviet Airspace. The likely culprit of the divergent flight path was a mis-programmed inertial navigation system that the Korean flight crew did not update during the flight. This is perhaps an unfair comparison since it occurred in the “pre-GPS era,” but it does point to the danger of following the instructions of a generally-seen-as-reliable navigation system.

Trade and Tariffs

The impact of friction on trade is different than the examples I’ve addressed so far. In the cases of artificial intelligence, the internet and space; friction is related to components of an overall system—data centers, undersea cables, space launch facilities—being tied to and limited by their locations.   With trade, friction is generally caused by distance.

There is a popular notion of global trade being empowered by massive cargo ships that can seamlessly and efficiently move goods around the world.   Yes, there can be disruptions--a dock strike, pirate or terrorist attacks at shipping lane choke points, a ship running aground in the Suez Canal—but routes can be adjusted and efficiencies largely maintained much like with internet traffic and the occasional severing of an undersea cable. With attention being placed on globalization and the supply chains that support it, we lose sight of the fact that distance matters.

A geographer will say that Mexico and Canada are our best candidates for trading partners in large part because they are close by.   Trade data demonstrate this.

While China seems to get all the press, it was only the U.S.’s largest trading partner--in terms of dollars—for a few short years, from 2015 to 2019. Every other year since 2000, the U.S.’s largest trading partner has been either Canada or Mexico. For example, in 2023, the U.S. imported $485 billion in goods from Mexico. China came in second with $428 billion. However, this was just $1 billion more than Canada at $427 billion. (15) If one were to add the two together, the U.S. trades almost double the amount with these two countries as it does with China. One of America’s biggest “ports” in terms of trade value is not on either coast, but in Laredo, Texas, on the border with Mexico.

This phenomenon is not limited to North America. The largest percentage of traders with European countries are other European countries.

To the geographer, this is not much of a surprise. “The resistance that geography imposes on trade has long been studied in the empirical economics literature – and the main conclusion is that trade intensity is strongly linked to geographic distance.” (16)

In a free trade environment, an economist would argue that China offers a comparative advantage in producing industrial goods inexpensively and is therefore a lucrative trading partner. But with the introduction of tariffs on goods imported from China, Mexico and Canada, we are no longer talking about free trade. Geographers—along with economists—can only speculate what the impact of these tariffs will be.

It will be interesting to see if the geographic proximity of Mexico, Canada and the United States will trump (pun intended) the ill-will and cost burdens caused by these tariffs.

There is another geographic component to these tariffs. One rationale for them is to economically motivate companies producing goods for the United States in Canada and Mexico to relocate those efforts to the United States. Perhaps we’ll start growing avocados in Alabama or making tequila in Tennessee. More loggers may be needed in Oregon. If friction is caused by distance, tariffs may lead to some things being closer at hand.

NOTES

1. Geography is often referred to as the “mother of all sciences” because it is one of the earliest known scientific disciplines. Most of the known scientific writings of antiquity attempted to explain the characteristics of the earth and the relative positions of things on it. Personally, I think geographers are the ones who commonly promulgate this moniker.

2. Or, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. It was fashionable for the learned to write in Latin back then.

3. Newton’s first law is known as the law of inertia. His second law concerns momentum and states that when a force is applied to an object, its acceleration (and conversely its de-accelaration) is related to the mass of the object.   Newton’s third law states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

4. Guilluame Amontons, a French physicist and contemporary of Newton, published his three laws of friction in 1699 which were rediscovered from Leonardo da Vinci’s writings two centuries earlier.

5. Carl von Clausewitz was an 19th century Prussian military theorist. His seminal work, On War, was edited and published by his widow following his death. This 1832 work reached prominence in the post-Vietnam U.S. military and became required reading for military leaders. I should know, it was on the reading list of a senior service school I attended—as a Department of Defense civilian—in the 1990’s. It was “urban legend” one received extra credit for including a reference to Clausewitz in any papers written at the school.

6. The best meme for describing the Clausewitz view of friction comes from the movie, Forest Gump. For a period of his life, Forest took to running, essentially non-stop except to sleep. He eventually garnered a great deal of attention. People began running with him and seeking his guidance.   At one point Forest stepped in a dog turd while running. When asked about it, he simply said “It Happens.” In the movie, his statement got refashioned into a popular bumper sticker.

7. There is more to AI than occasionally asking CHATGPT for the answer to a random question. Companies will use AI algorithms to first train on and then analyze their own data. They need places to store both the data and the processors needed to plow through and analyze the data. Sometimes the data is relatively specific. Think of a company using AI for self-driving cars. It must have a large data set of images and scenarios that the self-driving AI model must learn from. Factors such as performance, cost, regulatory compliance, and proprietary considerations will dictate how much information is kept in a data center rather than relying on cloud storage or the World Wide Web at large. Even a general AI tool such as CHATGPT will first look at its training model data and only go out on the internet if the question requires data more current than that in its training model. (Think of the difference between historical research and a question about current events.) If you don’t believe me, go ask CHATGPT!

8. With a focus on data centers, it didn’t seem that bitcoin mining facilities quite fit in. Bitcoin has also led to the construction of facilities with high power requirements requiring banks of computers. Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by running repetitive algorithms which require these huge banks of computers. Entities that set up and run these facilities are referred to a bitcoin miners. As an incentive to set up these facilities to confirm transactions, the system periodically rewards the miners with bitcoins worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.    More so than traditional data centers, the emphasis for bitcoin miners it to keep cost low. They tend to prefer rural areas where land and power costs are low. They also may use air cooling—which equates to large industrial fans—rather than more expensive air conditioning. Some may use noisy on-site generators. This has led to complaints of noise pollution and health impacts at some locations—Bono, Arkansas, and Granbury, Texas, are two such locations that have been highlighted in the press. Talk about local friction!

9. This information comes from Alan Mauldin, a research director at Telegraphy. It was included in a March 15, 2024, Telegraphy.com blog entitled “Beyond the Red Sea Blues: West Africa Faces Fresh Cable Faults”

10. Some count Cape Canaveral as two launch facilities. The U.S. Space Force maintains the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station which is co-located with the NASA’s Kennedy’s Space Center. To further complicate things geographically, the Space Force Station occupies most of the physical Cape Canaveral while the NASA Space Center is on adjacent Merrit Island. Launch pads are located on both, so from a geographic perspective, some NASA launches take place from Merrit Island. To confuse things from an administrative perspective, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station is tied to Patrick Space Force Base located about 12 miles to the south on Satellite Beach. You also may have heard the area referred to a Cape Kennedy. After President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Johnson issued an executive order changing the name of the area to Cape Kennedy, a name change ultimately approved U.S. Board of Geographic Names. There was local pushback, particularly from the City of Cape Canaveral located just south of the Cape. In 1973, the Florida Legislature passed a law restoring the former 400-year-old Canaveral name and the Board went along. (It will be interesting to see how long we have a Gulf of America.)

11. There are inland launch facilities, but they are limited in what they can do. Amazon’s Blue Origin has a suborbital launch facility, Launch Site One, in west Texas, 25 miles north of the town of Van Horn.   You likely have read about manned space launches from this location, but they have all been sub-orbital. Blue Origin’s heavy lift vehicle is launched from Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast. There are a few inland space ports—some more wishful thinking than others—but these are for small space rockets launched from aircraft at altitude.

12. To further complicate things, Vandenberg and Canaveral are sometimes referred to as the Western or Eastern Ranges respectively. These include the geographic areas extending from the launch complexes to large expanses of the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean and the facilities (land based and sea based) required to track rocket launches.

13. For a number of years after the end of the cold war—when the U.S. was lacking in heavy space launch capacity (rockets not launch facilities)--it partnered with Russia to send astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station. Fortunately, the U.S. was able to resolve this heavy launch gap by the time Russia invaded Ukraine.

14. GPS spoofing is different than another danger of commercial aircraft flying too close to war zones—getting shot down. A Russian air defense missile is alleged to have caused the crash of Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 in December 2024. In January 2020, the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 over Iran, misidentifying it as a possible cruise missile being launched against Iran by U.S forces in retaliation to Iranian missile attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq. Russian-backed rebels in Ukraine, also using a Russian air defense system, shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. The United States has not been immune from making this type of mistake. In 1988, it shot down an Iranian commercial flight over the Persian Gulf mistaking it for a hostile Iranian aircraft attacking the USS Vincennes.   I put all these out of the category of geographic friction into the realm of human error—with horrific results.

15. In case you were wondering, the ranking flips for exports with Canada coming in first ($355 billion), Mexico second ($323 billion) and China a distant third ($149 billion).

16. This quote comes from Our World in Data and specifically the portion of their web site that covers Trade and Globalization.