Teddie’s Landschaft

This article considers the concept of cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) from Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, exploring how the philosophy of natural beauty in relation to historical built environments resonates with ideas of musical landscape and experiences of peripatetic listening. If Adorno’s mature thought is marked by the fractured experience of exile, his late evocations of displacement actually echo youthful experiences on holiday—notably, the striking volcanic terrain of a summer vacation in Italy, which is transformed soon thereafter into a reflection on landscape, alienation, and song. Throughout the recurrences of the trope of landscape in Adorno’s writings before Aesthetic Theory, the philosophy of nature and history and experiences of tourism and exile constellate into an aesthetic that contemplates sublimity and kitsch side by side: modernist philosophy as shaped by experiences of music, travel, and landscapes of distance and estrangement.

Recharge–Discharge Relations of Groundwater in Volcanic Terrain of Semi-Humid Tropical Highlands of Ethiopia: The Case of Infranz Springs, in the Upper Blue Nile

The major springs in the Infranz catchment are a significant source of water for Bahir Dar City and nearby villages, while sustaining the Infranz River and the downstream wetlands. The aim of the research was to understand the hydrogeological conditions of these high-discharge springs and the recharge–discharge relations in the Infranz catchment. The Infranz catchment is covered by highly pervious and young quaternary volcanic rocks, consisting of blocky, fractured, and strongly vesicular scoriaceous basalt. At the surface, these rocks crop out as lineaments forming ridges, delimiting closed depressions in which water accumulates during the rainy season without causing surface runoff. Geology and geomorphology thus combine to produce very favorable conditions for groundwater recharge. Three groundwater recharge methods were applied to estimate groundwater recharge and the results were compared. Groundwater recharge was calculated to be 30% to 51% of rainfall. Rapid replenishment raises the groundwater level during the rainfall period, followed by a rapid decline during the dry season. Shallow local flow paths discharge at seasonal springs and streams, while more regional and deeper flow systems downstream sustain the high-discharge springs and perennial Infranz River. The uptake of 75% of spring water for the water supply of Bahir Dar City, local extraction for domestic and small-scale irrigation use from springs, rivers and hand-dug wells, encroaching farming, and overgrazing are exacerbating wetland degradation.

A low-cost device for measuring local magnetic anomalies in volcanic terrain

Reconstructions of the past behavior of the geomagnetic field critically depend on the magnetic signal stored in extrusive igneous rocks. These rocks record the Earth's magnetic field when they cool and retain this magnetization on geological timescales. In rugged volcanic terrain, however, the magnetic signal arising from the underlying flows may influence the ambient magnetic field as recorded by newly formed flows on top. To measure these local anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field directly we developed a low-cost field magnetometer based on a fluxgate sensor. To improve the accuracy of the obtained paleomagnetic vector and user-friendliness of the device, we combined this fluxgate sensor with tilt and GPS sensors to rotate the measured magnetic vector to true north, east, and down. The data acquisition is done using a ruggedized laptop, and data are immediately available for first-order interpretation. The first measurements done on Mt. Etna show local variations in the ambient magnetic field that are larger than expected and illustrate both the accuracy (certainly <0.5∘ in paleomagnetic direction) and potential of our new device.