The deep seabed has always inspired a cartographic impulse. For the scientific community, this is nowhere better exemplified by its current attempts to map the entire global ocean floor by 2030 as a ‘corrective’ to its relative lack of data. Yet, this paper argues that such efforts reproduce a historic relationship between deep ocean scientific knowledge production and colonial extractivism which is the basis for contemporary deep-sea mining efforts. To build the case, this paper critically analyses three seminal moments of deep-seabed mapping. First, it considers the British government backed Challenger Expedition (1872–1876) as a precursor to modern oceanography and ‘the first to explore the deep sea successfully on a global scale’ (9). Second, it examines original archival research on a series of expeditions in the 1960s and 1970s that discovered underwater hydrothermal vents for the first time. Finally, it offers a critical perspective on the aforementioned seabed mapping practices of today. Taken together, it is shown that these examples are partly about the attempts to fix the seabed into an objective ‘fact’ of science that can be mapped, taught and sedimented in policy. Yet, they also work to mobilise speculation by imagining new capitalist futures based on a literal unearthing of the metals and minerals required to build green energy infrastructures.
John Childs (Mon,) studied this question.