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Paper short abstract:

Under certain forms of technical pressure, coral skeletons can become temporal proxies. This transformation into time data takes place in laboratories where techniques inherit and reproduce time-depth. But in the lab, encounters with 'dimensional friction' reveal orientations beyond the vertical.

Paper long abstract:

In the 20th Century, coral space — particularly the Great Barrier Reef — emerged as a political battleground. In the 21st Century, coral time, produced in laboratories, emerges as a political battleground. As the temporalisation of reefs becomes a charged inflection point for governance, securitisation, and hallucinatory wars, how can we pay closer attention to the practices of those skilfully making coral time? Based on fieldwork in a coring laboratory at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, I introduce ‘dimensional friction’ as an analytic for considering how the temporal structure of proxy records intersects with the temporal structure of global climate science. Under certain forms of technical pressure, these coral proxies can be transformed into planetary timelines. In the lab, simultaneously discursive, technical, and imaginative problems take coral core scientists — and ethnographers of laboratory times — deeper and deeper inside the mineral matrix of corals, into the carbonate structures that form reefs. ‘Dimensional friction’, appearing when this matrix is manipulated, reveals how ‘vertical time depth’ is reproduced in the laboratory, but also suggests ways of temporalizing (and corporally appropriating) coral time differently.