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Paper short abstract:

From the mid-nineteenth century, the Strait of Gibraltar became a model for studying ocean circulation at larger scales. This paper highlights the importance of four periods of oceanography at the Strait asking for their global epistemological, geopolitical, and environmental significance.

Paper long abstract:

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the Strait of Gibraltar has become a model for studying ocean circulation at larger scales. Historians can also approach it as a miniature ocean. This paper highlights the importance of four periods of oceanography at the Strait asking for their global epistemological, geopolitical, and environmental significance.

The first period revolves around the British investigations of the 1860s and 70s, in particular William Carpenter and the demonstrations of the existence of an undercurrent (as well as its important precedents and techno-scientific context). The second period are the “Scandinavian” expeditions of the first half of the 20th century (including here the importance of the temperature-salinity diagrams in the debates of the 1920s and 1930s on the Mediterranean deep current). The third period I study is marked by the transnational studies of the second half of the 20th century (emphasizing especially the role of NATO's military patronage in fostering scientific and military interest in investigating the influence of local fluctuations in the thermocline). Finally, the paper explores the current oceanographic monitoring system Argo (autonomous buoys that allows the study of non-surface water layers, thus complementing the information provided by oceanographic and meteorological satellites).

This longue-durée approach to a very specific place invites us to pose new questions about the interrelationships between science, geopolitics, and oceanic environments.

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Paper short abstract:

In the late nineteenth century, many early oceanographers focused on physical oceanography, but Prince Albert I of Monaco instead focused on physical conditions as a precursor to understanding biology. This paper explores this "environmental" approach as an alternative track for early ocean science.

Paper long abstract:

Historians of ocean science have frequently asked why France did not become an important locus of early oceanography, but instead concentrated on marine biology. This question presupposes a “right” way to do oceanography. The late nineteenth century birth of oceanography coincided with the widespread adoption of the term “environment” (“milieu” in French), which Etienne Benson (2020) has traced from earlier French naturalists describing the relationship between organisms and their "surrounding circumstances." This environmental approach to ocean science can be clearly seen in the work of Prince Albert I of Monaco, who was born and educated in France and ruled the neighboring principality.

This paper examines Albert's environmental approach to ocean science, which focused on an iterative examination of the oceans. Beginning in the 1880s, he outfitted a series of ocean-going yachts as research vessels and invited scientists from across Europe to participate in scientific cruises in the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Arctic. He first studied surface currents, then incorporated studies of subsurface, pelagic, and benthic physical conditions, which he explicitly described as background for understanding ocean biology. Albert publicized his efforts broadly, calling on both scientists and governments to participate in international efforts and to establish programs in their own countries. This paper thus considers Albert's environmental approach to oceanography as an alternative origin story, which should be examined alongside other international scientific efforts at the turn of the twentieth century, and posits his influence on both France and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, formed in 1902.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, investigating how the history of artificial reef development can inform our understanding of the values we assign to the natural world through the deployment of simulations of such spaces.

Paper long abstract:

Americans have been building artificial reefs for almost 60 years, with state programs (Alabama) beginning as early as 1965 and a federal program established in 1972. The Clinton Administration (1993-2001) committed federal resources to artificial reef development and research, and today, the United States is surrounded by thousands of artificial reefs meant to perform multiple functions, including coastal storm protection, habitat restoration, tourist attraction, and fisheries enhancement. The sheer amount of reef projects does not indicate the disjointed nature of these projects. Project managers and reef designers use wildly different values to assess the need for a reef and a very small number of projects are monitored over an extended period to provide information on its success or failure.

This paper adopts an interdisciplinary approach, investigating how the history of artificial reef development can inform our understanding of the values we assign to the natural world through the deployment of simulations of such spaces. Taking Martin Krieger’s seminal essay in Science “What’s wrong with plastic trees?” (1973) as our starting point, we ask why we build these reefs and whether we should. Understanding these issues is particularly important as artificial reef development expands due to increasing concerns about climate change.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the history of how oceans and climate were connected through new data practices towards the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. It discusses the case of the Argo program of autonomous floats as an example of how the ocean was environed.

Paper long abstract:

The Argo program coordinates an array of autonomous floats that roam the upper 2000 meters of the ice-free ocean, collecting data on currents, temperature and salinity. The data are communicated in near-real time via satellites to designated receiving centers around the world, where the raw data are made available for immediate purposes, such as weather forecasting, before being checked for quality, made user-friendly and eventually published as high-quality data for scientific uses, including climate studies. Since its inception in the late 1990s, the Argo program has dramatically increased the amount of ocean data that is collected and made available for scientists and others to use. This paper approaches the Argo program through a twofold theoretical perspective, using the concepts of environing technologies from environmental history and environmental narratives from ecocriticism. From this theoretical starting point, I analyze how Argo data and practices environ the deep ocean in ways that connect the ocean to climate science and policy. I consider how this climate-centered view of the ocean impacts the formation of marine environmental narratives, including the role of the Argo program in formulating contested and competing views on deep-sea sustainability.

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Paper short abstract:

Scientists dive in the Baltic Sea study the environmental repercussions of marine heatwaves with an innovative underwater experiment. In this paper I show how, in scientific practices, marine heatwaves are enacted as a spatial, temporal, and techno-material objects that foretell oceanic futures.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on ethnographic observations conducted at a marine zoological station in Southern Finland to detail how marine researchers scuba dive underwater to study the effects of marine heatwaves in the Baltic Sea. The Baltic is described as special or peculiar because of, among others, its low biodiversity and salinity levels, high pollution, and relative average shallow depth (which allows for scientific scuba diving); All characteristics that make it a likely image, a time-machine, of what the rest of the oceans could look like in the future. I approach marine heatwaves in the Baltic as objects able “to apprehend time, to foretell futures: ecological, scientific, political, local, planetary” (Helmreich 2023:xvii). Based on a 100-year-old time series of seawater temperatures, researchers identified increasingly frequent marine heatwaves in the sea surrounding their research station. Crucially, however, the time series did not provide any insights on the environmental repercussions. The scientist-divers had to negotiate work underwater to setup a very innovative – yet quite precarious – in-situ experiment in the Baltic Sea: They designed incubation chambers to be placed at the seafloor. Through common household floor-heating technology, they simulated heatwaves inside these chambers and monitored bio-chemical processes through regular water sampling. During my fieldwork, the skills of scientific diving became entangled with the challenges of building underwater incubation chambers (Muka 2023), and with performing and maintaining an experiment functional-while-submerged (Jue, 2020). Studying marine heatwaves and making them apparent, thus, emerge as a spatial, temporal, and techno-material problem of different scales simultaneously.

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Paper short abstract:

How can museums enable reflection and learning about the ocean as part of environmental citizenship? This paper discusses approaches with which 'blue museums' can become drivers of a sustainable climate transition, and how the concept of 'ocean citizenship' can be helpful in such an effort.

Paper long abstract:

Interested, informed, and active people are vital if green transitions are to become a global movement that leads to more sustainable ways of being in the world. Museums worldwide attempt to become drivers of a sustainable climate transition. This paper argues that ‘blue museums’ (here understood as museums, information centres, heritage sites, and vessels oriented towards the ocean due to research, collection, exhibition, and teaching) have a special responsibility and opportunity in this context. The ocean is where many human-driven ecological impacts and disasters can be observed, and a societal shift towards a sustainable future will thus also need to address human impacts on the ocean.

I start my paper by clarifying three central concepts – 'environmental citizenship', 'historical consciousness', and the 'participative museum' – before I discuss the concept of 'oceanic citizenship'. I argue that the development of oceanic citizenship must focus on three skills, namely transitional skills, transnational skills, and transdisciplinary skills. The participatory museum, which has abandoned the dichotomy of nature and culture, is particularly suitable for strengthening these skills. In the next step, I discuss current innovative approaches from museums near and far from the coast that narrate 'blue heritage', and thus become places of learning for oceanic citizenship. Finally, I will suggest how we can promote an international 'blue curatorship' and how we can strengthen the exchange between academia and museum professionals.

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Paper short abstract:

I will demonstrate the link between transformation of societal vision of the sea through the 18th century and adaptation of strategies used by authorities in order to make Russia maritime, not just possessing a navy, but participating in the oceanic industries and consuming the products of the Ocean

Paper long abstract:

I will present and discuss basic ideas of a monograph submitted to Cambridge Oceanic histories. I will demonstrate the link between transformation of societal vision of the sea as a natural object through the 18th century and adaptation of strategies used by the Russian imperial authorities in order to make Russia maritime, that is not just possessing a navy, but participating in the oceanic harvesting industries and consuming the products of the Ocean. Furthermore, I argue, knowledge as such became part of these dynamic consumption patterns, with the expansion of the image of societal importance of Oceanic nature's knowledge from the purely Royal curiosity materialized in the courtly collections to the open discussion in the journals that formed the opinions of educated society. I will concentrate on three cases – influence of the Amsterdam cabinets of curiosities observed during the Grand Embassy, on the image of oceanic exoticity and superabundance; interlinks between the Royal curiosity of Russian emperors from Peter I to Catherine II and their authority over the natural resources of the sea; a conflict between educated knowledge of the sea elaborated in St. Petersburg and local expertise of hunters and fishermen accumulated in the White Sea area.

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Paper short abstract:

In 1898–1899, the German Deep-Sea Expedition aboard the Valdivia sparked a fascination with the Indian Ocean’s deep-sea flora and fauna. It also inspired Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen, the governor of German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), to propose the idea of a deep-sea aquarium.

Paper long abstract:

In 1904, Gustav Adolf Graf von Götzen, the governor of German East Africa (today’s Tanzania), proposed the idea of a deep-sea aquarium in Dar-es-Salaam. This followed the emergence and rise in popularity of aquariums as public attractions across Europe and North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. My thesis is that the German Deep-Sea Expedition aboard the Valdivia in 1898–1899 sparked a fascination with the Indian Ocean’s deep-sea flora and fauna and was the catalyst that led to the establishment of this aquarium. Previously, oceanography had mostly focused on the ocean’s surface; technological advances and a new zeal for discovery in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed for the exploration of a new frontier: the deep sea.

Von Götzen was convinced that an aquarium perched on the shores of the Indian Ocean world would be uniquely suited to provide the scientific community, within the German Empire and beyond, with findings relating to the study and exploration of the Indian Ocean; he also hoped it would impart knowledge to the local people about the fauna of the Indian Ocean. The aquarium collaborated closely with the scientific staff aboard the SMS Bussard, a German vessel stationed in Dar-es-Salaam, and several institutions in Germany and abroad but encountered many difficulties. Difficulties arose from importing delicate glass planes for the aquarium from Germany, attracting staff with the necessary knowledge to maintain a healthy aquarium, and paying the upkeep costs, ultimately leading to its closure in 1909.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the first forty years of Greek oceanography operations, c.1900-1940. It argues that in the early years of Greek oceanography, it was the ideological incentive of reinventing Greece’s maritime prowess that resulted in the most positive developments in the field.

Paper long abstract:

This paper follows the trail of early oceanographic research by the Greek Hydrography Service, kicking off with preliminary surveys at the port of Piraeus in the 1890s to more technologically advanced oceanographic voyages at the eve of the Second World War. it is guided by Rozwadowski’s (2010) assumption that ‘motive is the critical precursor to technology’ and that motivations and desires tied to cultural notions could be more compelling than technology in forging ahead with oceanographic research. It argues that in the early years of Greek oceanography, it was the ideological incentive of reinventing Greece’s maritime prowess that resulted in the most positive developments in the field, and that deep sea research of Greek waters served as an ideologically loaded vehicle aiming to promote Greek maritime prowess within the Mediterranean basin. This aspiration hinged on ancestral claims of Greece as being the archetypal Mediterranean maritime nation and was further fuelled by the desire to make Greece the scientific hub of deep-sea exploration in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the shockingly underexploited fisheries resources dotting the Green waters made Greek ocean research imperative for nutritional and commercial purposes. However, as long as inherently rigid structural pitfalls in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge persisted within Greece, Greek oceanographic research was characterized by inconsistency for at least the first 40 years of its existence.

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Paper short abstract:

I will examine how political, cultural, and scientific ideas influenced the construction of the "Meteor" and the practices on board and how they shaped an image of the ocean in Germany.

Paper long abstract:

In 1959, the first World Congress of Oceanography was held at the United Nations Building in New York. Upon his return, Georg Dietrich, one of the leading figures in German oceanography, said: “We will have to draw consequences”. The USA, the USSR and the UK presented their latest advances in marine science and technology, while Germany did not even have a sufficient research vessel. So, what was the German contribution to international marine science and how did German scientists view the ocean?

Germany had a special situation in this early phase of marine science in the Cold War, which is still understudied. German oceanographers were caught between a glorious past and a difficult present. Under these circumstances, most German actors saw the solution in regaining German influence on the oceans by building research vessels. So, Germany built the ship “Meteor” II. Research vessels as instruments, laboratories, and social spaces have influenced what we know and don't know about the ocean. Therefore, I will illustrate the German perception of the ocean in the 1960s by examining the discussions about their construction and first voyages. I will examine how political, cultural, and scientific ideas influenced the construction and practices on board and how they shaped an image of the ocean in Germany. An important focus will be the difference between the discussion in Germany and the existing literature on ocean science and policy in this period.

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Paper short abstract:

In an age of big science, the German marine ethologist and documentary filmmaker Hans Fricke (*1941) represents a small science approach. His TV documentary about his habitat Neritika in the Red Sea (1978) re-iterated Space Age pathos while ultimately remaining skeptical of underwater colonization.

Paper long abstract:

In 1978, the German marine ethologist and documentary filmmaker Hans Fricke (*1941) built an underwater habitat at a depth of 11 meters in the Red Sea. He used it to study the coral reef ecosystem and to produce a documentary for German television. Fricke presented his foray "into the watery mantle of our planet" in the context of the space age. As with the French documentary filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, the conquest of "inner space" in analogy to "outer space" formed the central frame of meaning. Unlike Cousteau, however, and unlike manned space flight, Fricke is not an example of large-scale Cold War exploration. In an age of big science, he represents a small-science approach. While Cousteau dreams of "Homo Aquaticus" (Helen Rozwadowski), Fricke is ultimately more skeptical about human adaptation to the ocaen. At the end of his TV documentary, the human divers return to the surface while the plants and animals of the reef colonize the habitat. Fricke concludes that technology allows us to stay in the submarine for long periods of time, but ultimately we humans remain strangers in the extreme nature of the underwater world.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the history of Point Nemo, the most "remote" place on Earth in the South Pacific Ocean and how it became an aquatic graveyard for space crafts and space debris in the later half of the twentieth century.

Paper long abstract:

What is environmental history the history of? What can it be about? This paper considers these questions using Point Nemo, the most remote place on Earth in the South Pacific Ocean, as a case study for exploring the fringes of environmental history as it intersects science and technology studies. Since the 1970s, international space agencies have directed over 260 defunct space crafts and space debris into Earth’s Oceans. This paper examines the history of how a certain region in the South Pacific Ocean became an aquatic space ship graveyard and subsequently the most “remote” place on Earth, in short, Point Nemo or the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Located 1,450 nautical miles from the nearest land, well beyond the 200 nautical mile boundary of territorial seas, Point Nemo as a site for the accumulation of space junk raises new questions about environmental justice in a place outside of environmental jurisdiction. Building on existing scholarship on “extreme environments,” I develop the idea of technoscientific environments to emphasize the crucial role of science and technology in mediating how humans have known, accessed, and constructed places such as Point Nemo, in ways that are deeply value- and power-laden.