Moscow and St. Petersburg, a sequence of capitals, a tale of two cities

From early modern times until the present, Russia (temporarily extended to the USSR) had two capital cities: Moscow and Petersburg. Moscow was the original capital, it was succeeded by Petersburg from the beginning of the 18th century. From the early 20th century onward Moscow again became the capital, but it became a different kind of capital at the end of the 20th century. The paper describes the evolution of the representation of the state function in the appearance of the capital cities by way of the state buildings, the monuments, the street names. In addition it analyses the fate of the former capitals (first Moscow, then Petersburg) in terms of their symbolic functions. Petersburg originated as a capital turned to the outside emphasizing Russia's European vocation, while Moscow was at first the inward looking capital city representing the distinctive spiritual values of Russia. Changes had to do with the changes in the nature of the successive political regimes and with the changing roles of the two cities within those regimes.     

Dictators and their capital cities: Moscow and Berlin in the 1930s

Stalin and Hitler planned major changes in the townscapes of their capital cities. These plans were part of their effort to install highly mobilized despotic regimes that needed a wide-ranging set of symbols to focus allegiance and to impress awe. These plans remained to some extent paper exercises but part of it left significant traces in the contemporary cities, particularly in Moscow. The intended changes showed similarities in their megalomania expressed in plans for a gigantic dome surrounded by a huge public square in the core of the city. There were also differences as regards the type of symbols used due to both dictotors' different roles within their regimes, the degree of didactic intent due to the nature of the commanding ideologies and the level of modernization of both countries, and the diverging versions of antimodernist building style (which they shared with many others elsewhere at the time).     

Ecological evaluation of an experimental beneficial use scheme for dredged sediment disposal in shallow tidal waters

An experiment was performed to test an alternative dredging strategy for the Westerschelde estuary. Clean sand dredged from the navigation channel was disposed seawards of an eroding intertidal flat in order to modify morphology and hydrodynamics, improving the multi-channel system with ecologically productive shallow water habitat. Five years of intensive monitoring revealed that part of the disposed sediment moved slowly towards the flat, increasing the very shallow subtidal and intertidal area, as planned. The sand in the impact zone became gradually finer after disposal, possibly due to reduced current velocities. Nevertheless, no changes in macrobenthic biomass, density, species richness and composition were detected in the subtidal zone, also demonstrating rapid macrobenthic recovery. In the intertidal zone, no ecological effects could be revealed superimposed on trends associated with long-term sediment fining. Thus, despite morphological success and absence of detected negative ecological impacts of the experiment, new beneficial habitat was not created.     

Efficient scheme for the shallow water equations on unstructured grids with application to the Continental Shelf

In this paper, a shallow-water flow solver is presented, based on the finite-volume method on unstructured grids The method is suitable for flows that occur in rivers, channels, sewer systems (1D), shallow seas, rivers, overland flow (2D), and estuaries, lakes and shelf breaks (3D). We present an outline of the numerical approach and show three 2D test cases and an application of tidal propagation on the Continental Shelf. The benefits of applying an unstructured grid were explored by creating an efficient model network that aims at keeping the number of grid cells per wavelength constant. The computational speed of our method was compared with that of WAQUA/TRIWAQ and Delft3D (the commonly used structured shallow-flow solvers in The Netherlands), and comparable performance was found.     

Vertical copepod aggregations and interactions with chlorophyll and production on the Peru shelf

Data consisting of high resolution profiles of in situ chlorophyll fluorescence and copepods have been measured with a towed Batfish on the Peru shelf during November 1977. The day to day vertical variability of chlorophyll fluorescence was highly complex; however, there were indications of common features consisting of a surface chlorophyll layer about 10 to 15 m thick and a subsurface chlorophyll maximum at about 25-m depth. Of the dominant copepods measured, Eucalanus inermis, Calanus chilensis, and Centropages brachiatus, the latter two were aggregated in layers at about 15 to 20 m directly within a depression located between the surface and subsurface chlorophyll layer. Primary production profiles estimated from light and chlorophyll data indicated that carbon production was generally restricted to the surface layer (≈15m). Estimates of integrated carbon production (m^?2) within the surface layer ranged from 1.3 to 1.5 g C m^?2 d^?3. Copepod grazing estimates indicated that only 10% of daily carbon production was utilized.     

Pollen‐ and diatom based environmental history since the Last Glacial Maximum from the Andean core Fúquene‐7, Colombia

The late Pleistocene–Holocene ecological and limnological history of Lake Fúquene (2580 m a.s.l.), in the Colombian Andes, is reconstructed on the basis of diatom, pollen and sediment analyses of the upper 7 m of the core Fúquene‐7. Time control is provided by 11 accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) ¹⁴C dates ranging from 19 670 ± 240 to 6040 ± 60 yr BP. In this paper we present the evolution of the lake and its surroundings. Glacial times were cold and dry, lake‐levels were low and the area was surrounded by paramo and subparamo vegetation. Late‐glacial conditions were warm and humid. The El Abra Stadial, a Younger Dryas equivalent, is reflected by a gap in the sedimentary record, a consequence of the cessation of deposition owing to a drop in lake‐level. The early Holocene was warm and humid; at this time the lake reached its maximum extension and was surrounded by Andean forest. The onset of the drier climate prevailing today took place in the middle Holocene, a process that is reflected earlier in the diatom and sediment records than in the pollen records. In the late Holocene human activity reduced the forest and transformed the landscape. Climate patterns from the Late‐glacial and throughout the Holocene, as represented in our record, are similar to other records from Colombia and northern South America (the Caribbean, Venezuela and Panama) and suggest that the changes in lake‐level were the result of precipitation variations driven by latitudinal shifts of the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.