simulations of the sea modelling future ecologies
Marly Ibrahim
an accidental prototype On the afternoon of August 7, 2008, Mount Kasatochi, a volcanic island in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands erupted without warning. A plume of ash rose nearly fifteen kilometres into the atmosphere before drifting east across the Gulf of Alaska. Carried by winds and ocean currents, the ash, rich in iron, eventually settled into nutrient-poor waters off the coast of British Columbia. Within weeks, satellite imagery recorded an immense bloom of blue-green phytoplankton diatoms spreading across the ocean surface, triggered by the sudden influx of iron. These microscopic algae form the base of the marine food web and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This sudden flourishing of algae rippled upward through the marine food chain. Zooplankton and small fish increased, resulting in an unexpected surge in regional salmon returns in British Columbia rivers. For marine scientists, the event suggested that marine ecosystems, and by extension the climate, could be engineered. Kasatochi became a planet-scale prototype for mitigating climate change. a rogue geoengineer Four years later, American entrepreneur and environmentalist Russ George attempted to reproduce the eruption’s unintended effects. Having previously promoted carbon sequestration projects on land, George turned his attention to the ocean frontier, describing it as an underproductive ‘pasture’, deficient in iron nutrients. 1 Working through the Haida Salmon Restoration Corporation, George partnered with members of the Haida Nation in 2012 to disperse one hundred tons of iron sulphate into international waters off the coast of Haida Gwaii. The iron fertilisation experiment sought to stimulate phytoplankton growth to produce a resurgence in declining regional salmon populations and to sequester atmospheric carbon. Satellite imagery again recorded a vast phytoplankton bloom, spanning an area of 10,000 square kilometres. While salmon returns appeared to increase in subsequent years, the long-term environmental impacts remained uncertain, and the experiment was widely criticised for bypassing international oversight and governance. Dubbed the world’s first ‘rogue geoengineer’, George shifted the collective imagination of oceans. 2 He framed this boundless expanse as an economic asset that could be optimised and 1 Russ George, ‘COP25 Message - 100 Villages to Restore This Blue Planet’s Ocean Pastures Immediately’, 2019. r ussgeorge. net/2019/12/11/cop25-message-100-villages-to- restore-this-blue-planets-ocean-pastures- immediately/ 2 Zach Horton, ‘Going Rogue or Becoming Salmon?: Geoengineering Narratives in Haida Gwaii’, Cultural Critique , vol. 97 (2017) p. 128-166, Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cul.2017.a674300
financially leveraged. Through a carbon credits funding model, iron fertilisation promised a chain of value: iron stimulates plankton, plankton stimulates salmon as a resource and absorbs carbon which then becomes a tradeable commodity through global carbon markets. Plankton, salmon and carbon become linked within a speculative financial ecology, transforming oceanic processes into units of value. The ocean itself was remodelled as infrastructure for value production. The ocean, historically a frontier of trade, migration and military power, is progressively becoming a frontier of climate intervention. Operating beyond clear international jurisdiction, George’s experiment treated the open ocean as a laboratory without shared oversight, reducing complex environments to sites for testing speculative futures. Despite the proposed chain of advantages, many scholars criticise this experiment due to its unpredictability. Andreas Malm feels these ‘techno-fixes’ risk obscuring the root causes of climate change. 3 Geoengineering necessarily operates at the scale of the planet, as it deliberately modifies the interconnected planetary systems of the Earth’s climate, oceans and atmosphere. Although George’s experiment may have begun as a localised intervention off Haida Gwaii, its environmental impacts extended beyond regional boundaries, revealing how planet-scale interventions can produce uneven geographies of benefit and risk. the world is a model The rise of geoengineering and techno-fixes belong to a larger history of subjecting nature to human control. It dates to the construction of dams that coordinated the movement of fish and human labour, enabling their commodification as productive systems for resource extraction and management. Nature shifted from landscapes of inhabitation to active sites of infrastructure that optimised natural resources. To assist in the management of these infrastructural interventions, large hydraulic models were built.
The US Army Corps of Engineers models of, left , Chesapeake Bay and right , the Mississippi River basin.
US Army Corps of Engineers
3 Andreas Malm, ‘The future is the termination shock: On the antinomies and psychopathologies of geoengineering. part One’, Historical Materialism , vol. 30, no. 4, 2022. pp. 3–53, https://doi. org/10.1163/1569206x-20222369
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on site review 49 :: shorelines
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