Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Drawing on five weeks of participant observation aboard the Norwegian research vessel and icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, this paper examines coring as a way of “sensing” the deep sea, while reflecting on the socio-political stakes of making it knowable—or keeping it unknown.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on five weeks of fieldwork aboard the Norwegian icebreaker Kronprins Haakon, this paper examines coring as a way of “sensing” the deep sea, while reflecting on the socio-political stakes of making it knowable—or keeping it unknown. Beneath the waves, the deep sea holds stories written in mud, rock, and gas: records of past climates, tectonic shifts, and life itself. To protect it, exploit it, or reconstruct its deep-time histories, scientists must first core it—extracting sediments, minerals, and fluids that capture a snapshot of the present while enabling reconstructions of the past and projections into the future. These samples become portals through which the deep sea is rendered knowable and valuable.

A rock retrieved from the Fram Strait, for instance, may be a "window" of Earth’s mantle, yet it might also be "just" a fragment transported by ice and deposited on the seafloor. Collecting such materials is therefore not merely a scientific practice; it can shape territorial claims and geopolitical interests, turning sediments into instruments of power. This paper asks how coring technologies shape human encounters with the deep sea while themselves being shaped by material conditions—such as the yielding softness of deep-sea mud, which resists robotic movement—and what these encounters reveal about the limits of scientific knowledge. What tensions emerge between geological time, scientific temporalities, and short-term political agendas? And what does a “from-the-ground-up” anthropology of the deep sea disclose about today’s polarised world? By pursuing these questions, the paper traces the political dimensions sedimented on the Arctic seafloor.