The ocean is increasingly valued for its capacities as a carbon sink. This paper connects emerging marine carbon activities with historical practices of oceanic waste disposal to add insight on the nature of risk, experimentation, and contamination in contemporary seas.
Long abstract:
The ocean is increasingly valued not simply as resource or territory but for its capacity to absorb and sequester carbon and thus to buffer the planet from the effects of climate change. From storing carbon under the seabed to enhancing ocean alkalinity, from planting mangroves to sinking biomass into the deep, the ocean is becoming the site of numerous experimental practices of carbon management. Yet these activities often occur out of sight, concerning materials and dynamics that are poorly understood and difficult to envision, and entangle different sites and scales in highly complex ways. Nonetheless, these experimental engagements are highly significant to contemporary understandings of the ocean and its relation to planetary life. This paper uses technoscientific engagements with marine carbon to explore the significance of emerging notions of the ocean as a climatic buffer. Crucially, this entails not simply emphasising the novelty of these practices, but also the ways in which they are shaped by previous exploitation of the ocean, such as nuclear waste disposal at sea. Drawing connections with the technoscientific practices and politics of nuclear waste can, I argue, add insight into how risk and experimentation are understood in an increasingly volatile sea, and provide orientation toward ethical oceanic engagements in a time of climate crisis and contamination.