How underwater mediation has transformed deep-sea spaces into resource-rich frontiers
 

Green energy technologies such as windmills, solar panels, and electric vehicles may soon depend on material found at the seabed. How did a space once imagined to be empty and unfathomable come to be thought of as a treasure trove of resources? Lisa Yin Han traces how contemporary developments in underwater sensing and imaging materially and imaginatively transmogrify the ocean bottom into a resource frontier capable of sustaining a digitally connected global future.

 

Set against the backdrop of climate change, energy transition, and the expansion of industrial offshore extractions, Deepwater Alchemy looks at oceanic media and its representation of the seabed in terms of valuable resources. From high-tech simulations to laboratories and archives that collect and analyze sediments, Han explores the media technologies that survey, visualize, and condition the possibility for industrial resource extraction, introducing the concept of extractive mediation to describe the conflations between resource prospecting and undersea knowledge production. Moving away from anthropocentric frameworks, she argues that we must equalize access to deep ocean mediation and include the submerged perspectives of multispecies communities.

 

From the proliferation of petroleum seismology to environmental-impact research on seabed mining to the development of internet-enabled seafloor observatories, Deepwater Alchemy shows us that deepwater mediation is entangled in existential hopes and fears for our planetary future. As the ocean bottom becomes increasingly accessible to people, Han prompts us to ask not whether we can tame the seafloor, but, rather, why and for whom are we taming it?

An octopus expert and celebrated artist offer a deep dive to meet the enchanting inhabitants of the world’s marine ecosystems.
 
Have you ever walked along the beach and wondered what kind of creatures can be found beneath the waves? Have you pictured what it would be like to see the ocean not from the shore but from its depths? These questions drive Janet Voight, an expert on mollusks who has explored the seas in the submersible Alvin that can dive some 14,000 feet below the water’s surface. In this book, she partners with artist Peggy Macnamara to invite readers to share her undersea journeys of discovery.

With accessible scientific descriptions, Voight introduces the animals that inhabit rocky and sandy shores, explains the fragility of coral reefs, and honors the extraordinary creatures that must search for food in the ocean’s depths, where light and heat are rare. These fascinating insights are accompanied by Macnamara’s stunning watercolors, which illuminate these ecosystems and other scenes from Voight’s research. Together, they show connections between life at every depth—and warn of the threats these beguiling places and their eccentric denizens face.
 

How France integrated the seafloor into its national territory through an interplay of science, technology, and geopolitical ambition during the Cold War.
 
Beneath the surface of the seas and oceans lies a territory as important for human societies as the exposed land and the airspace above them: the seafloor. Our daily life is inextricably linked to the seafloor and its resources, from global telecommunications infrastructure to offshore oil and gas extraction to strategic mineral mining.
 
By focusing on France, a country with an underwater territory seventeen times larger than its emerged lands, New Deep Territories explains how the seafloor emerged as a territory during the second half of the twentieth century. Beatriz Martinez-Rius traces the evolution of the country’s seafloor exploration and the motivations that fueled it, from the aftermath of World War I to the late 1970s. In the early 1960s, the seafloor, instead of colonial territories, came to be seen as a source of natural resources. The French government, corporations such as oil companies, as well as scientists, all imagined future uses of the seafloor, and these ever-evolving aspirations drove the development of technologies, techniques, and scientific fields that built up the submerged territory. Government officers and industrial stakeholders massively invested in technoscientific development to prepare for a future reliant on seafloor resources, including oil, gas, and minerals, well before it was technologically possible, economically feasible, and legally acceptable to extract them. The future they envisioned did not arrive, but their investment resulted in an unprecedented understanding of the ocean’s crust. Today, once again, national governments, international organizations, and private stakeholders are turning their attention to the seafloor.