Zola and the Physical Geography of War

Émile Zola’s account of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, La Débâcle (1892), provides the basis for an account of the way in which the literary language of war speaks to the physical geography of mimetic fiction as broadly conceived, and in particular its precise concern for mud, earth, soil, and its wider concern for land and its borders

Gender Difference and Cultural Labour in French Fiction from Zola to Colette

To sketch out the parameters of the field of male and female fiction on the cultural labour of women in the early Third Republic, I offer as wilfully contrary examples: Émile Zola’s short story, Madame Sourdis (1880), about the art world; Guy de Maupassant’s novel of mainstream journalism, Bel-Ami (1885), and Marcelle Tinayre’s rather different novel of feminist journalism La Rebelle (1905); and finally, Colette’s La Vagabonde (1910) which charts quasi-autobiographically Renée Néré’s post-divorce journey between stage performance and writing. In thus comparing male and female accounts of women’s role and status in the realm of cultural labour, this matrix of texts not only maps out the historical movement between centuries but also the aesthetic movement beyond the limits of exclusively male-authored French Naturalism, not simply in modernist fiction but in women’s writing too

The Settlement of Decolonization and Post-Colonial Economic Development

Despite impressive growth in the early twenty-first century, Indonesia’s economic performance in the post-colonial era lagged behind that of its neighbours in Malaysia and Singapore. The different development paths chosen, particularly in the treatment of foreign (and, especially, ex-colonial) investment, were central to this—Indonesia’s rejection of Western capital in the 1950s and 1960s, and continued suspicion of foreign economic influence in the 1970s, contrasted with the more open approach of Malaysia and Singapore. How the post-colonial foreign presence was dealt with was largely conditioned by how decolonization was settled—the restrictive agreements reached between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and ongoing Dutch occupation of Irian Jaya, were sources of widespread resentment, and differed significantly from the more liberal approach of the British towards Malaysian and Singaporean independence. The short-term settlement of decolonization was therefore of greater significance than the longer-term nature of colonial rule in determining post-colonial economic patterns

Seismic imaging of rapid onset of stratified turbulence in the South Atlantic Ocean

AbstractBroadband measurements of the internal wavefield will help to unlock an understanding of the energy cascade within the oceanic realm. However, there are challenges in acquiring observations with sufficient spatial resolution, especially in horizontal dimensions. Seismic reflection profiling can achieve a horizontal and vertical resolution of order meters. It is suitable for imaging thermohaline fine structure on scales that range from tens of meters to hundreds of kilometers. This range straddles the transition from internal wave to turbulent regimes. Here, the authors analyze an 80-km-long seismic image from the Falkland Plateau and calculate vertical displacement spectra of tracked reflections. First, they show that these spectra are consistent with the Garrett–Munk model at small horizontal wavenumbers (i.e., kx ≲ 3 × 10−3 cpm). There is a transition to stratified turbulence at larger wavenumbers (i.e., kx ≳ 2 × 10−1 cpm). This transition occurs at length scales that are significantly larger than the Ozmidov length scale above which stratification is expected to modify isotropic Kolmogorov turbulence. Second, the authors observe a rapid onset of this stratified turbulence over a narrow range of length scales. This onset is consistent with a characteristic energy injection scale of stratified turbulence with a forward cascade toward smaller scales through isotropic turbulence below the Ozmidov length scale culminating in microscale dissipation. Finally, they estimate the spatial pattern of diapycnal diffusivity and show that the existence of an injection scale can increase these estimates by a factor of 2.M.F. is supported by the Department of Earth Sciences. Research activity of C.P.C. is supported by EPSRC Programme Grant EP/K034529/1 (“Mathematical Underpinnings of Stratified Turbulence”). We thank C. Bond, A. Dickinson, K. Gunn, S. Holbrook, J. Klymak, J. Moum and S. Thorpe for their help. We are very grateful to J. Klymak for generously making available his MATLAB toolbox for calculating Garrett-Munk spectra. Department of Earth Sciences contribution number esc.XXXX.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the American Meteorological Society via http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JPO-D-15-0140.

Cenozoic epeirogeny of the Indian peninsula

Peninsular India is a cratonic region with asymmetric relief manifest by eastward tilting from the 1.5 km high Western Ghats escarpment toward the flood-plains of eastward-draining rivers. Oceanic residual depth measurements on either side of India show that this west-east asymmetry is broader scale, occurring over distances of >2,000 km. Admittance analysis of free-air gravity and topography shows that the elastic thickness is 10 ± 3 km, suggesting that regional uplift is not solely caused by flexural loading. To investigate how Indian physiography is generated, we have jointly inverted 530 river profiles to determine rock uplift rate as a function of space and time. Key erosional parameters are calibrated using independent geologic constraints (e.g. emergent marine deposits, elevated paleosurfaces, uplifted lignite deposits). Our results suggest that regional tilt grew at rates of up to 0.1 mm a‾¹ between 25 Ma and the present day. Neogene uplift initiated in the south and propagated northward along the western margin. This calculated history is corroborated by low-temperature ther- mochronologic observations, by sedimentary flux of clastic deposits into the Krishna- Godavari delta, and by sequence stratigraphic architecture along adjacent rifted margins. Onset of regional uplift predates intensification of the Indian monsoon at 8 Ma, suggesting that rock uplift rather than climatic change is responsible for modern-day relief. A positive correlation between residual depth measure- ments and shear wave velocities beneath the lithosphere suggests that regional uplift is generated and maintained by temperature anomalies of ±100 ⁰C within a 200 ± 25 km thick asthenospheric channel

Radial viscous fingering of hot asthenosphere within the Icelandic plume beneath the North Atlantic Ocean

© 2017 The Icelandic mantle plume has had a significant influence on the geologic and oceanographic evolution of the North Atlantic Ocean during Cenozoic times. Full-waveform tomographic imaging of this region shows that the planform of this plume has a complex irregular shape with significant shear wave velocity anomalies lying beneath the lithospheric plates at a depth of 100–200 km. The distribution of these anomalies suggests that about five horizontal fingers extend radially beneath the fringing continental margins. The best-imaged fingers lie beneath the British Isles and beneath western Norway where significant departures from crustal isostatic equilibrium have been measured. Here, we propose that these radial fingers are generated by a phenomenon known as the Saffman–Taylor instability. Experimental and theoretical analyses show that fingering occurs when a less viscous fluid is injected into a more viscous fluid. In radial, miscible fingering, the wavelength and number of fingers are controlled by the mobility ratio (i.e. the ratio of viscosities), by the Péclet number (i.e. the ratio of advective and diffusive transport rates), and by the thickness of the horizontal layer into which fluid is injected. We combine shear wave velocity estimates with residual depth measurements around the Atlantic margins to estimate the planform distribution of temperature and viscosity within a horizontal asthenospheric layer beneath the lithospheric plate. Our estimates suggest that the mobility ratio is at least 20–50, that the Péclet number is O(104), and that the asthenospheric channel is 100±20 km thick. The existence and planform of fingering is consistent with experimental observations and with theoretical arguments. A useful rule of thumb is that the wavelength of fingering is 5±1 times the thickness of the horizontal layer. Our proposal has been further tested by examining plumes of different vigor and planform (e.g. Hawaii, Cape Verde, Yellowstone). Our results support the notion that dynamic topography of the Earth's surface can be influenced by fast, irregular horizontal flow within thin, but rapidly evolving, asthenospheric fingers

Uplift histories of Africa and Australia from linear inverse modeling of drainage inventories

We describe and apply a linear inverse model which calculates spatial and temporal patterns of uplift rate by minimizing the misfit between inventories of observed and predicted longitudinal river profiles. Our approach builds upon a more general, non-linear, optimization model, which suggests that shapes of river profiles are dominantly controlled by upstream advec- tion of kinematic waves of incision produced by spatial and temporal changes in regional uplift rate. Here, we use the method of characteristics to solve a version of this problem. A damped, non-negative, least squares approach is developed that permits river profiles to be inverted as a function of up- lift rate. An important benefit of a linearized treatment is low computational cost. We have tested our algorithm by inverting 957 river profiles from both Africa and Australia. For each continent, the drainage network was constructed from a digital elevation model. The fidelity of river profiles extracted from this network was carefully checked using satellite imagery. River profiles were inverted many times to systematically investigate the trade-off between model misfit and smoothness. Spatial and temporal patterns of both uplift rate and cumulative uplift were calibrated using independent geologic and geophys- ical observations. Uplift patterns suggest that the topography of Africa and Australia grew in Cenozoic times. Inverse modeling of large inventories of river profiles demonstrates that drainage networks contain coherent signals that record the regional growth of elevation.This is the final version. It first appeared at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2014JF003297/abstract

La Débâcle d'Émile Zola : une fiction républicaine de la fin du Second Empire

La guerre franco-prussienne commence plusieurs fois Comment est-ce qu’un nouveau régime devrait parler du régime qu’il remplace ? Il va sans dire que Les Rougon-Macquart offrent, pendant les premières décennies de la nouvelle République, la plus célèbre relecture romanesque de l’Empire, une relecture dont l’historicité spécifique est soulignée par ce sous-titre que l’on connaît très bien : Histoire naturelle et sociale d’une famille sous le Second Empire. La publication du feuilleton du premier roman dans la série, La Fortune des Rougon, était interrompue par la guerre franco-prussienne, Le Siècle le publiant du 28 juin au 10 août 1870, et du 18 au 21 mars 1871. A l’édition originale chez Lacroix, Verboeckhoven et Cie, du 14 octobre 1871, Zola ajoute cette préface célèbre qui commence ainsi : « Je veux expliquer comment une famille, un petit groupe d’êtres, se comporte dans une société, etc.1 ». De façon peut-être plus symbolique qu’authentique, Zola précise en bas de la page de cette préface son lieu et sa date : « Paris, le 1er juillet 1871 », comme si pour marquer la fin de cette « année terrible », la dépêche d’Ems ayant été envoyée le 13 juillet 1870. Cette année a été décrite récemment par l’historien Quentin Deluermoz dans Le Crépuscule des révolutions comme « un mille-feuille dans lequel il faut découper avec précaution si l’on veut éviter téléologie et raccourcis2 »