The Subterranean in practice and popular imagination
In May 2023, researchers for the International Ocean Discovery Program, or IODP (a collaborative effort that draws funding from multiple government institutions across four continents), retrieved core samples from the planet’s mantle. The achievement is over sixty years in the making; in 1961, scientists and engineers aboard the barge CUSS I practiced an experimental drilling routine off Guadalupe Island in preparation for reaching the mantle. The official attempt, known as Project Mohole, proved a disappointing failure. The company selected to conduct the drilling—Brown & Root, a construction firm with no offshore experience—delivered minimal results and a blown budget. Although core samples from sediment beneath the ocean floor yielded some valuable information, the drilling failed to reach the earth’s mantle, which would remain out of reach for decades.. The Deep Sea Drilling Project (the predecessor of the IODP) struggled for years to succeed where Mohole had not, until the team aboard the JOIDES Resolution, the IODP’s flagship vessel operated out of Texas A&M University, cracked the case, extracting “a core of rock more than 1 kilometer long.” The discovery is of no small significance, carrying with it the potential for unlocking subterranean secrets long inaccessible. In geochemist Jessica Warren’s words, “We’re finally going to see the Wizard of Oz.”
As John Steinbeck noted in his 1961 piece covering Project Mohole, we know less about the world beneath the ocean floor than we do about the moon: “on this first touching of a new world the way to discovery lies open,” the author declaimed. Although the vacuum of space tends to occupy our cultural imagination more prominently as a region of danger (just think of the slew of popular space survival films from 1995’s Apollo 13 to 2015’s The Martian), the immense pressure and heat of the earth’s depths have revealed themselves to be even more resistant to human intervention. Outer space offers itself as the more visible figure for narrative explorations of the strikingly nonhuman. As humans, we don’t like to think of the ground beneath our feet being filled with mysterious or malignant forces, and stories that entertain such possibilities—from Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) to more contemporary fare—carry more unsettling implications than their interstellar counterparts. In Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (2008), for example, the underground is not a solid or stable mass but an ambiguous and porous zone, constantly shifting and recombining.
Yamashita’s and Negarestani’s novels present alarming, non-realist stories of fossil capital’s destructive exploitation of mineral resources—in Yamashita’s, through the figure of GGG, a multinational corporation intent on commodifying a strange new geological resource in the Amazon, and in Negarestani, through the neoliberal project of oil extraction in a Middle East that reveals itself to be geologically sentient. For both texts, the geophysical underworld mirrors the increased risk of our postindustrial Anthropocene—a world rife with environmental distress, climate change, and cascading ecocatastrophes often perpetuated or precipitated by the fossil fuel companies that have reaped massive profits in the age of global capitalism. The incompleteness of the earth’s interior gives the impression that we are erecting a way of life atop a planet that cannot support it. Hardly the comforting foundation that Hannah Arendt identified in The Human Condition (1958)—a world that, in her words, “may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice”—the earth is in fact an already alien planet, resistant if not hostile to our industrial endeavors.
Of course, the sense of ground (and underground) as complete and stable is a facet of our popular imagination. Earth scientists are under no illusion about the planet’s internal mobility—a concept understood at least since Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830) and amplified when Alfred Wegener’s description of continental drift was confirmed by the phenomenon of seafloor spreading in the 1960s (what we now know as the theory of plate tectonics). Even with the sample retrieved by the JOIDES Resolution, uncertainty remains about the deep places of the world, including whether the sample is actually from the mantle, the “deep crust,” or both. These boundaries aren’t clear and solid lines but blurry transition zones, much like the boundaries between atmospheric layers. Although science might be comfortable with the fluidity and inconsistency of the underground, however, it has less to say about what the underground means on a cultural level. Stories like Verne’s, Yamashita’s, and Negarestani’s, along with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Hugh Walters’s little-known The Mohole Mystery (published in 1968 in response to Project Mohole) can shed light on the role of the subterranean world in our broader cultural imagination, its possibilities and horrors.
The incompleteness of the earth’s interior gives the impression that we are erecting a way of life atop a planet that cannot support it.
Such horrors can reflect reactionary paranoia and anxieties about the nonhuman world, but they also constitute a corrective to the technocratic rationalism of extractive capitalism. As the oil and gas industries race to locate more reserves below the earth’s surface, literally cracking open the planet to retrieve fossil fuels and pumping warming pollutants into the atmosphere, geological fictions underscore the horrors that await us in an overbuilt world, up to and including our own extinction. As Robert Macfarlane suggests in Underland: A Deep Time Journey (2019), when imagining the world from its insides, keeping in mind its age and depth, “things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and vibrant again. Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.” In this sense, the legacy of Project Mohole is more than a quest for scientific knowledge. It is an uncanny enactment of industrial humanity’s hubristic effort to manufacture a world—to unearth materials from below and mold them into the world above. And as more material finds its way to our built surface, geological fictions of the Anthropocene remind us of the subterranean realms yawning beneath us.
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Posted by: life coach | August 17, 2023 at 07:57 PM