Hydrophones and the Historical Making of a Transatlantic Caribbean Oceanic Anthropocene

Abstract During the Second World War and the Cold War, the U.S. military developed a hydrophone array system called SOSUS (Sound Surveillance System) to listen underwater in the ocean. This arose in response to the threat posed by enemy submarines. But this technology was also fundamental for listening to oceanic living beings. This paper explores the history of the invention of SOSUS as fundamental to redefining a subaquatic Caribbean by tracing the history of research that led to its deployment. Through the interrelationship between military and environmental sonic history, the author seek to problematize the notion of encounter and explore the following questions: What does the encounter between animal and machine biopower tell us about the history of acoustic Atlantic crossings? Moreover, why was SOSUS deployed in the Caribbean initially and what sort of understandings of the submarine ocean and the history of the Anthropocene does this give rise to?