The soils of Arctic regions are of great interest due to their high sensitivity to climate change. Kvartsittsletta coast in the vicinity of the Baranowski Research Station of the University of Wrocław constitutes a sequence of differently aged sea terraces covered with different fractions of beach material. It is a parent material for several developing soil types. Despite the low intensity of the modern soil-forming processes, the soil cover is characterized by high diversity. Soil properties are formed mainly by geological and geomorphological factors, which are superimposed by the influence of climate and living organisms.
The degree of development of soil is usually an indicator of its relative age. This article highlights the dominant influence of lithology and microrelief over other soil-forming factors, including the duration for which the parent material was exposed to external factors. The soils on the highest (oldest) terrace steps of the Kvartsittsletta rarely showed deep signs of soil-forming processes other than cryoturbations. On the youngest terraces, deep-reaching effects of soil processes associated with a relatively warm climate, including the occurrence of cambic horizons, were observed. Their presence in Arctic regions carries important environmental information and may be relevant to studies of climate change.

The aim of the paper is to compare reactions of two stock markets, the German and the French, to releases of macroeconomic fundamentals emanating from Germany and the U.S. We examine the reaction of intraday returns and volatility of the CAC40 and the DAX indices to macroeconomic surprises. We find that both American and German macroeconomic releases cause an immediate response in returns and volatility of the German and the French stock market sampled at a five-minute frequency. The reaction to the American macroeconomic surprises is stronger than to the German ones.

In recounting or representing speech, both oral storyteller and literary narrator as well as the modern translator have at their disposal similar interpretive choices in how to represent it, ranging from mimesis to paraphrase to a simple notice that speech occurred. Most commonly, these metapragmatic comments take the shape of quotative frames, which introduce the represented speech and specify various pragmatic features of it, such as the original speaker, the original addressee, the nature of the speech event, or the reason for the speech event. The metapragmatic variety of quotative frames encountered within the Hebrew Bible has usually been described as the work of authors/redactors and attributed to written literary style. In this paper we first describe the metapragmatic shapes of quotative frames in Biblical Hebrew narrative and their discourse pragmatic functions. We then review recent evidence which suggests that at least some of the metapragmatic variety in biblical narrative reflects the oral strategies of representation employed by the storytellers/performers of originally oral texts. Finally, we explore the ways in which modern translators of the biblical text also engage in interpretation (or, a metapragmatic analysis) of the speech events portrayed in the text, using the story of the rape of Dinah (Genesis 34) as an example.