Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how ocean sediment are depositories of earthly, human/non-human conversations, re-shaped and archived by the sea. Such conversations speak to heritage as relational constructs and trouble ideas about archives as human ways of organizing and understanding the world.

Paper long abstract:

During a research cruise across the Irminger Sea, Deanmark Strait and Icelandic Basin with a team of ROCS scientist, I sat down with the project’s geoscientist. The sea’s swells were wreaking havoc on the cognitive abilities of my wave challenged brain, making only possible for the simplest of questions to emerge. “Our research at ROCS focuses on ocean, climate, and society” I said, staring into my coffee. “Why the ocean?” He looked straight at me, with the patience imperative for transdisciplinary conversations. He replied, “because everything ends up in the ocean”. This paper rises out of this simple yet transformative conversation. It seeks empirical grounding in the samples of marine sediment cores collected with a gravity corer on the ROCS research cruise in June 2021, some of which date 40.000 years back. This research engages with the collection of cores aboard the research vessel as well as the cores themselves. This presentation cuts across the popular binaries of nature and culture as it tentatively articulates how – as everything ends up in the ocean - the seafloor is a depository where the earth’s information is collected into sediment and driven by the ocean’s layers and currents that shape its own practices of “taxonomy”. In this presentation I argue that oceans as archives for earthly recollections based on human and non-human conversations speaks to heritage as more than human constructs and troubles resilient ideas about archives as human ways of organizing and understanding the world.