Palaeoenvironmental significance of Late Permian palaeosols in the South‐Eastern Iberian Ranges,Spain

The Late Permian (Wuchiapingian) Alcotas Formation in the SE Iberian Ranges consists of one red alluvial succession where abundant soil profiles developed. Detailed petrographical and sedimentological studies in seven sections of the Alcotas Formation allow six different types of palaeosols, with distinctive characteristics and different palaeogeographical distribution, to be distinguished throughout the South‐eastern Iberian Basin. These characteristics are, in turn, related to topographic, climatic and tectonic controls. The vertical distribution of the palaeosols is used to differentiate the formation in three parts from bottom to top showing both drastic and gradual vertical upwards palaeoenvironmental changes in the sections. Reconstruction of palaeoenvironmental conditions based on palaeosols provides evidence for understanding the events that occurred during the Late Permian, some few millions of years before the well‐known Permian‐Triassic global crisis.     

INDUSTRIAL HERITAGE AND PLACE IDENTITY IN SPAIN: FROM MONUMENTS TO LANDSCAPES*

In Spain, the birth of interest in the nation's industrial heritage dates from the 1980s and occurred alongside the process of deindustrialization. Policies concerning derelict industrial sites have shifted gradually from destruction to preservation, rehabilitation, and enhancement, and industrial heritage enhancement projects are now widespread in the country. However, a clear mismatching has arisen between institutional and academic initiatives and local communities, which exhibit widespread disinterest in or even rejection of industrial remains. This problematic situation can be related to the utilization of industrial heritage as an economic resource without paying much attention to its connections with memory and identity. Also, the mismatching is due to a positivist approach to industrial heritage whereby the monument and the museum are prioritized. We argue that projects which consider industrial remains as part of cultural landscapes might shorten the gap between the institutional and economic side of industrial heritage and its identity‐building and popular facets.     

AN APPROACH TO THE MEASUREMENT OF THE POTENTIAL STRUCTURAL DAMAGE OF EARTHQUAKE GROUND MOTIONS

The quantification and prediction of damage due to different seismic actions to structure types of different strength is an important problem not yet solved in the Earthquake Engineering field. In addition, owing to the fact that macroseismic information cannot be used directly in dynamic calculations, a new problem appears when these are the only kind of data available. Thus, there is a need to estimate a parameter to relate the energy of the ground motion and the damage occurrence, and eventually achieve a better seismic risk assessment. After the study and review of some representative potential damage parameters, attention has been paid to the Arias intensity (unfiltered and filtered in certain frequency ranges) and the Cumulative Absolute velocity (CAV) as the parameters to evaluate the energy of movement, and to relate them with the observed damage. The data used to infer these correlations have been provided by the ENEA-ENEL (Italy). The information consists of strong motion records from the Campano Lucano (1980), Umbria (1984) and Lazio-Abruzzo (1984) earthquakes, and data of damage to buildings in the vicinity of recording instruments (within a maximum radius of 300 m, where the soil conditions remain constant). In this paper, some relations have been obtained to quantify the damage level for different seismic inputs. The results suggest that unfiltered Arias intensity and CAV (for calculation threshold 20 cm/s²) correlate well with the macroseismic information used. Best fits are obtained between the quoted parameters and the observed damage in type A structures. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.