Geography of the Republic
The physical setting of the Republic, its climate, water, land cover and resources.
The Republic of Fluid occupies a peninsula at the northern edge of Asia Minor, with sea on three sides and land frontiers only in the south. It lies in the temperate transition zone, between the maritime climates of the north-west and the drier continental interiors to the east, and its weather is accordingly changeable, with few extremes. The territory covers about 230,000 square kilometres and holds 18,402,000 residents, a density of roughly eighty to the square kilometre.
Geologically the peninsula sits on the Fluid plate, a small independent plate wedged between the larger masses to the north and south. Its northern margin is passive and produces the drowned coastline of Merrisoma and Lindoma; its southern margin is compressional and produced the western uplands, the south-eastern hills and the mineral deposits that have shaped the Republic's economy. Seismic activity is frequent and mild, and building standards are set accordingly under Article 178(1).
The Republic is divided into two regions, the Western and the Eastern, and into twenty sub-regions which are also its electoral districts. Twenty-two towns are named in the register; they hold about 22.6 per cent of the population, the remainder living in villages small enough to be governed by an assembly of their residents meeting in person.
1Position and relief
1.1The Fluid plate
The peninsula sits on a small independent plate. Its northern boundary is passive, and the coast there is a drowned landscape of estuaries, spits and shallow bays: the harbour at Lindoma and the tidal bay at Merrisoma are both drowned valleys. Its southern boundary is compressional, and the relief of the Republic decreases steadily away from it.
Earthquakes are frequent and rarely damaging. The last event above magnitude 6 was in 1934, and the construction standards required of every building throughout the territory are fixed centrally under Article 178(1)(b). Since 2021 the REP-KJS system has broadcast warnings to the whole territory ahead of the shaking, on the ten-step REP intensity scale. The landslide and flood warning systems were developed in 2024 and 2025.
1.2Relief
The highest ground is the Vandorum upland in the western region, an upland plateau of old rock cut by valleys with the deepest soils stripped by the felling of 1929 to 1935. North of it the Kelvaqui moor is lower and wetter, and is covered in blanket peat. The western arable plain around Durorilaqui is the flattest and most fertile ground in the country.
In the east the land falls from the interior divide at Ilvara toward the seaboard. The Quintorum basin in the centre-east is the flattest and driest district; the Belvacius hills in the south-east are exposed and thinly settled, and have the best wind resource in the Republic. The eastern shore alternates between cliff at Cortius and lagoon and dune at Ravelluri.
2Climate
2.1General character
The Republic lies in the temperate transition zone. Winters are cool and wet, summers warm, and the year has no dry season anywhere except the eastern interior. Rainfall falls with distance from the north-western coast, from more than 1,200 millimetres a year on the Kelvaqui moor to under 500 in the Quintorum basin.
Four local climates are conventionally distinguished in schools. The northern and western coasts are maritime: mild, wet, windy, with little annual range. The western uplands are cooler and wetter still, with snow lying on the high ground for six to ten weeks. The interior and the east are continental in tendency, with warmer summers, colder winters and a summer rainfall maximum. The sheltered south-west around Venasca is the warmest and sunniest district, which is why the orchards and vines are there. The normals behind this division, the station records they are drawn from and the forecasts issued against them are published by the Meteorological Cooperative of the Republic.
2.2Observed change
The Ecological Budget Authority records a mean warming of about 1.4 degrees since 1960, greater in winter than in summer and greater inland than on the coast, from the series the Meteorological Cooperative measures and publishes. Three consequences have already passed from science into administration.
The Quintorum basin failed three harvests in the seven years to 2019, a frequency without precedent in the record. The eastern shore at Ravelluri has retreated by roughly nine hundred metres since 2013, and the commune of Marendo is being moved landward over forty years, a sea wall having been set aside. Rainfall in the south has become more intense without becoming more plentiful, which is the pattern that produced the Sornorum floods of 2017.
3Hydrography
3.1Watersheds
Water is administered by watershed. Administrative boundaries have no part in it. Article 28(2) makes the watershed the unit of water administration and gives its boundaries precedence over the sub-regional map, so a river basin crossing a boundary is managed by a joint body of the councils concerned.
The principal divide runs through Ilvara in the inner north. Rain falling on one side of that town reaches the sea at Lindoma and on the other at Leriduson, a circumstance that generated two centuries of water disputes.
3.2Rivers and standing water
The Marnaqui is the longest river, rising on the eastern side of the divide at Ilvara, running east across the central plains through Tavrino, and ending in the Ravelluri lagoon at Marendo, from which the water reaches the sea through the bar. Its principal tributary, the Anselura, joins it from the north. It is also the most closely watched: the reach below the chemical works at Tavrino was biologically dead by 1966, remediation began in 1977, and the first fish returned in 1994. Continuous monitoring data from that reach are published under Article 35(1).
The Ravelluri lagoon is the largest body of standing water, brackish, shallow and separated from the sea by a dune barrier. The Merrisoma salt marsh behind the north-western bay is the largest intertidal system and the principal wintering ground for migratory birds on this coast. Both are protected against conversion under Article 30(1).
3.3Abstraction and supply
Freshwater abstraction is capped per basin, and abstraction beyond documented recharge is prohibited. Ecological flows are fixed for every watercourse and may not be reduced by any plan. The northern reservoirs above Ilvara supply both regions. Disconnection of a dwelling from water is prohibited outright.
4Land, soil and living systems
4.1Land cover
About two fifths of the territory is farmed, a quarter wooded, a fifth rough grazing, moor and peat, and the remainder built, wetland or bare. The proportions have moved slowly since the 1970s, with woodland rising as the Vandorum replanting proceeds and built land held roughly constant by the prohibition on sealing fertile ground.
Old-growth forest survives in fragments on the western upland. Roughly a fifth of the original stand was felled between 1929 and 1935 to pay for imports during the Depression, and the replanting begun in 1983 runs on a hundred-year schedule. Peatland on the Kelvaqui moor, dune and seagrass at Ravelluri, and the Merrisoma marsh are all inalienable and closed to conversion.
4.2Soils
The deepest soils are the loams of the western plain around Durorilaqui. The uplands have thin acid soils that erode readily once the tree cover is removed, which is the lesson of the 1930s felling. The Quintorum basin has fertile but drought-prone soils that depend on the abstraction regime. Loss of topsoil beyond the documented rate of formation is prohibited.
4.3Living systems
Habitat connectivity is a condition of validity for every spatial plan, so protected areas are designed as a linked network of connected sites. The characteristic species of the moor, the marsh, the lagoon and the remaining old growth are monitored continuously and the data published; the species known from the Republic and nowhere else are listed with their red list category in the catalogue of endemic species. Nature holds rights of its own under Article 18, and any person at all may go to court on behalf of a river, a marsh or a population, without a fee and without showing a personal interest.
5Natural resources
5.1Minerals
The Republic is poor in fossil fuel. The coal seams at Vandorum and Kelvaqui were thin and shallow, largely exhausted within two generations, and closed for good on the fossil schedule. There is no oil and no gas.
Uranium found in 1956 is the only mineral wealth the country has held in quantity: shallow and of high grade, in the uplands above Ferrista and beneath the Kelvaqui moor. The monazite sands at Ravelluri yield thorium and rare earths. Building stone comes from the Vandorum quarries and iron ore, now largely depleted.
5.2Energy
Electricity comes primarily from fission and wind. The first reactor entered service above Cortius in 1964 and by 1970 fission had more than half the supply. The wind resource above Corcina has been developed since 1998.
Fission is now transitional. Authorisation of any new installation lapses on the day the Ecological Budget Authority certifies that the whole supply is renewable, and the labour, materials and energy for waste custody and decommissioning must be reserved inside the plan before a plant operates.
6Human geography
6.1Settlement
Settlement is dispersed. The capital, Lindoma, holds about 1,140,000 residents, roughly one in sixteen of the population, and no other town exceeds 350,000. The twenty-two named towns together hold about 22.6 per cent of the population; the rest live in villages, most of which are below the threshold at which an elected council replaces an assembly of residents meeting in person.
The largest towns after the capital are Cortius on the eastern seaboard, Leriduson on the north-eastern coast, Sornorum at the southern crossroads, Durorilaqui on the arable plain and Lutoliluri, the southern port.
6.2Language
The Republic has no official language. Article 16(1) gives every person the right to address public authority in a language they understand, with interpretation and translation provided free of charge, and leaves the languages of official record to organic law. Where a community forms a significant part of the population of a commune, that commune conducts its assemblies, publishes its acts and provides instruction in that language.
In practice a single language is used across most of the territory, with distinct community languages in the western border communes around Ossira, among the descendants of the arrivals of 1939 to 1945 at Leriduson. Ossira operates the largest interpretation service in the country.
6.3Frontiers
There are two land frontiers. The western crossing at Corvaluri has been open to Iosmein since 1989, and residents of Iosmein enter, remain, work, study and receive care in the Republic on the same footing as residents. The southern frontier with Bor Brashavenko has been closed since 1939, when that kingdom aligned with the Axis.
The third link is maritime: the corridor from Lutoliluri to Sluland in Reformed Luces Aporia, which handles the greater part of the Republic's remaining external exchange. Reformed Luces Aporia lies south-east across the water and has a more arid climate than the Republic, though it's still a transitional one.
7Transport and movement
7.1Roads
Traffic drives on the right. Vehicle dimensions, masses and axle loads are fixed identically throughout the territory under Article 178(1)(a) and are tested at Vestrano, and heavy goods vehicles use cab-over-engine layouts, as elsewhere in the region, because the length limits are measured over the whole combination, the trailer included.
The motorway network is small: a single north-south route from Lindoma through Sornorum to the port at Lutoliluri, with a western spur toward Durorilaqui. Almost all long-distance freight moves by rail, and the road network that matters is sub-regional, a dense system of two-lane roads maintained by the sub-regions under Article 174(1) and connecting the villages to their market towns.
7.2Movement within towns
Public transport sufficient to reach work, care, education, provision and public life is guaranteed and is free at the point of use. Private cars are correspondingly rare, and are resource-intensive goods under Article 112: they are held in common by communes and federations and used by booking or rotation, with no allocation to individuals.
Lindoma has the fewest cars of any city in the Republic. Since 2019 it has operated an experimental network of small automated pod vehicles running on segregated lanes between the neighbourhood centres and tram lines. The pods hold between four and eight passengers and are booked through the public information system. Article 51(5) requires that a human being remain accountable for any decision with legal effect, and the network accordingly runs under the supervision of identified controllers at all times; the arrangement is reviewed annually and has not yet been extended to another town.
8See also
Reference material maintained by the Office of Constitutional Revision under Article 317. It is not law, and where it differs from the Constitution the Constitution governs.