The article is dedicated to the analysis of ancient civilizations of India and China. The processes of geographic civilization focuses creation, expansion of its «vital space» by the way of further development, influence of the territory’s landscape structure on the development of agriculture, the economic basis of a civilization, the role of natural environment in spiritual culture development, significance of external relations and geographic horizon are considered. The attempt has been made to find out the reasons of ancient traditions’ sustainability and gap of the civilizations in scientific-technical and economic progress in the early modern era. The two landscape types are clearly distinguished in the group of «river» civilizations: a) oasitic-river type, appropriate to extra arid zones of tropical and subtropical deserts and b) monsoonal-river type, specific to the monsoonal region of Eurasia in the latitude range from pre-subtropics to the sub-equatorial belt. The first type (the Nile valley of Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Indus valley) existed solely due to the transit runoff; its agriculture is only possible through irrigation. The fresh water source for the second type (Ganges basin and Eastern China) is either transit runoff or atmosphere precipitation, and the agriculture is combined, rairn-fed and irrigative. Individual features of every «river» civilization, particularly its development potential, time of its existence, sustainability of ancient traditions, etc, are in many ways dependant on its geographic macro-location (location in the system of landscape macro-regions, on the ways of migration flows and trade routes, et al), on the area and landscape structure complexity of populated space. Therein, the civilizations of Mesopotamia and Eastern China may serve as the examples of dramatic contrast.

It is shown that the steric fluctuations of World Ocean level (WOL) should be advisably considered as a sum of «fast» and «slow» components. The «fast» component is dependent on the external heat balance that determines the heat content fluctuations of ocean’s active layer. The «slow» component lies in heating (cooling) from above and redistribution of heat throughout the ocean to the lower boundary of main thermocline that lasts for not less than two decades due to the low vertical speeds. It is established that the trend formation in steric level fluctuations takes place due to the «slow» component, contribution of which amounts more than 70 % of the base process dispersion. It is described by the physicostatistical model with the input data of sea surface temperature (SST) values in 5897 nodes of two-degree grid of the World Ocean for the period from 1955 to 2002. The model’s statistical mechanism consists in using the procedure of shearing step-by-step multiple regression. The 20 prediction models have been calculated up to 2033 inclusively with different advance time with respect to SST. The absence of significant trend in prognostic estimation of steric fluctuations is established starting from 2003. This implies the considerable deceleration of WOL’s steric component in the first two decades of 21st century due to the World Ocean’s cooling as a result of its heat content decrease. The estimations of heat content carried out in recent years by different authors verify the cooling of ocean’s deep layers since 2003.