In 1991, the Danube Delta, the largest marshland in Europe, famous for its biodiversity, became a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. Due to this designation, new regulations concerning local use of the environment have been imposed by the Romanian government and the European Union. Relying on participant observation, in-depth interviews, oral histories and archival work as main research methods, this paper scrutinizes from a cultural anthropologic perspective the changes in the local patterns of natural resource use before, (1880s-1950s), during (1960s-1980s) and after communism (1989). The findings discuss how the resource exploitation of fish and ecologic management of Danube Delta has been under constant transformation, from capitalist system, to communist one, and back to capitalism combined with “green” policies today. The second part of the research focuses on the present practices pointing to the locals’ perceptions of the changes occurred over the past century and the problems they face today in the context of resource depletion and climate change. Moreover, considering the fact that it seems that personal agenda of the authorities weights more than the rule of law, locals from the Danube Delta see democracy and environmental protection rules as a means for people in key positions to have a monopoly over the highly valued resources of the protected areas, which they profit from in illicit ways. Consequently, this research argues that due to new environmental policy-making, that systematically ignored the local participation, and due to the weak law enforcement in the context of post-communism, the fishing communities in the Danube Delta experience an acute social and environmental degradation today.
Subaqueous gravity flows (SGF) including sediment-laden turbidity currents are quite common in nature and are important both in transporting land materials into lakes, oceans and also in shaping the subaqueous morphology. By checking the flow thickness versus specific energy curves of SGF undergoing from 0.5° to 10° seven slop transitions for the first time, it is surprising to find that: i) contrary to popular thinking, SGF on most part of the slope with Froude number larger than unity are not supercritical; ii) there are two inflection points on the thickness-energy curves, indicating SGF are supercritical only in short regions around the inlet and slope transitions, something like open channel flows undergoing a sluice gate; iii) the critical Froude number of those SGF are well above unity corresponding to weaker internal hydraulic jumps than their cousins in open channel with unity critical Froude number; iv) the higher the slope transition, the wider the supercritical flow region. These findings may assist us in understanding the mechanisms of some subaqueous topography relating with subaqueous gravity flows.