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Short abstract:

I examine appeals to data continuity following the “discovery” of the “Ozone hole” over the Antarctic in the context of efforts to mount a stable, on-ice labor force, highlighting gendered labor regimes and automation as key issues materially entangled with maintaining planetary data infrastructure.

Long abstract:

STS researchers are well-positioned to study the material dimensions and embeddedness of knowledge and data infrastructures undergirding global environmental processes. This paper proposes doing so in relation to one of the most celebrated episodes in the history of environmental science, the “discovery” of the “Ozone hole.” In the years prior to the publication announcing the discovery, the ongoing collection of Ozone data in the Antarctic was called into question by the UK government. Rhetorically and politically, the significance of and subsequent press surrounding the identification of seasonal Ozone depletion above the Antarctic came to retrospectively justify a logic and practice of data continuity that the station retains into the present. This logic and practice are closely entangled with the struggles of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) to assemble seasonal or 1-2 year long labor forces to infrastructurally maintain the conditions of data collection on the ice. Drawing on a mix of archival and interview materials, this paper situates Ozone data continuity in the context of various dramatic transformations in the labor composition of Halley: first, the much-resisted introduction of women into the on-ice work of BAS in the 1980s and second, the ongoing automation of Antarctic scientific observation that’s been accelerated in the context of rapidly shifting environment conditions, the pandemic, and UK budget cuts for scientific activity. In doing so, the paper makes a case for examining social labor and labor struggles in making sense of the material entanglements of planetary data infrastructures.