Ice, oil and internationalism: An environmental history of geophysics, 1918-1958

This research project will situate the early history of geophysics in the history of environmental knowledge.

It will follow the proliferation of the geophysics concept in three different settings – international scientific organizations, the petroleum industries and among Scandinavian scientists in the Arctic – between 1918 and 1958.

The project will turn to geophysics as not merely a scientific discipline, but as an emergent regime of planetarity which came to structure ways of knowing the spatial and temporal properties of the planet.

Geophysical frameworks have – through concepts such as the Anthropocene and Earth System Science – acquired pressing political dimensions, but their histories have often remained out of view.

The decades after WWI is a crucial, yet understudied, period in the history of planetary-scale environmental knowledge, which more often focuses on the postwar era.

During this time, geophysics gained institutional and scientific momentum in a wide set of contexts and scientists from different disciplines as well as oil prospectors made use of the geophysics concept to describe their work.

Through three archival case studies, the project will provide a history of how geophysics shaped the planet as an object of knowledge and extraction between 1918 and 1958 and thereby offer an alternate genealogy of the present deliberations on the Anthropocene. The project seeks to explore how histories of the geosciences can be written in a new planetary age.