History Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing History Theses and Dissertations by Author "Brazier, Hayley"

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    Seafloor Machina: Aging Technologies in the Depths of the Pacific Ocean
    (University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Brazier, Hayley; Weisiger, Marsha
    Everyone is talking about, reporting on, and studying the ocean, focusing on issues from sea level rise and pollution to coral reefs and algae blooms. Yet the piece we are missing in our study of the sea is understanding how we are industrializing the ocean floor, how the marine environment is responding to that industrialization, and how our present-day society cannot function without the manipulation, engineering, and management of machines on the seabed. By combining historical, primary source research with present-day marine science, this study offers one of the first environmental histories of the ocean floor. The dissertation analyzes the development of three seafloor industries in the northeast Pacific Ocean from the 1890s into the present day, including oil and gas drilling in the shoreline, telecommunications cables on the continental shelf, and cabled observatories in the abyss. These industries have become indispensable to onshore society: offshore drilling accounts for approximately 30 percent of the globe’s supply of oil; undersea cables facilitate 98 percent of all Internet and international phone traffic; and cabled observatories are scientific instruments at the forefront of collecting marine data that can help to prepare society for earthquakes, tsunamis, and the effects of climate change. Fixed seabed infrastructure has become one of the most important ways that humans are interacting with the ocean, just as fisheries have been to previous generations. I argue that the industrialization of the northeast Pacific’s seabed has resulted in a persistent interaction between marine life and machines. Within months of entering the seawater, marine life colonizes seafloor technologies and transforms them into habitat, a transition I refer to as the machine's biotic afterlife. The biotic afterlife marks not only the decades or centuries the machine will spend in the sea but also its integration into the seafloor’s ecology. Once these machines have spent years, decades, and now centuries in the ocean, what to do with them—to remove, or not to remove?—is the underlying question that drives this dissertation. Ultimately, as this research shows, the removal of machines from the seabed is often a political decision, rather than an ecological one.