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Short abstract:

Much of what we know about the oceans today relies upon acoustic data translated into visual and other formats. This exploratory paper considers what it means to see with sound at the interface of technology and extreme environments, and the kinds of underwater worlds and futures which result.

Long abstract:

In recent decades, historians have traced the enduring human fascination with the sea(s), drawing attention both to the long history of “plumbing the deep” with simple instruments thrown overboard wave-tossed seacraft and increasingly complex, technologically-mediated efforts to map and explore marine worlds, a project which gained traction in the nineteenth century, altering the relationship between humans and oceans with ongoing ripples of influence. Today, much of what we know about the oceans and seas is intimately bound up with, and deeply dependent upon, acoustic techniques of single- and multibeam echo sounding which use the properties of sound underwater to construct data that can be translated into images of otherwise un-seeable environments. But what does it mean to see with sound in these ways – and what are the resulting effects of these techniques and artifacts upon the shape of the underwater worlds they produce? Are there ways in which we reproduce the totality of our own social and political worlds within these spaces – a kind of Foucauldian heterotopic waterscape? This exploratory paper seeks to build upon the work of scientists, humanists, and STS scholars to consider how sound and sense are made (and made perceptible) at the interface of technology and extreme environments underwater and, relatedly, how ocean environs, underwater soundscapes, noise pollution, and climate futures are constructed, imagined, and productively deployed, even as marine scientists increasingly call for greater globalization, data sharing, and international, interdisciplinary cooperation toward the longstanding goal of mapping the entirety of earth's ocean floor.