Holy Shit I Have a Thesis

An Oceanic Acid Trip forming planetary immersion Megan Hayes 11748389 University of Amsterdam rMA Cultural Analysis Thesis June 2019 Supervisor: Dr. Timothy Yaczo Second Reader: Dr. Jeff Diamanti Contents Introduction: Descent ___1. Chapter 1: The Shell Dissolve ___7. Chapter 2: Slippery Fish __23. Conclusion: Dissolutions __40. Works Cited __44. Descent Having plummeted from the boat, dragged down in a blur of diving weights and the unfamiliar, I suddenly found myself with a racing heart twelve metres below the surface of the water. The most immediate intensity was the recognition that air was now at a distance, both in space and time. Never before had I been so encompassed by a body of water, and it was an introduction to a flood of new pressures, sensations, and anxieties. But the medium of the water became familiar soon enough, and having settled into the idea of breathing from a scuba tank it was a relief to notice that the seasickness had now abated after a choppy two-hour boat ride from Townsville, now being held by water rather than racing across its surface. Breathing easy let my focus start seeping out beyond turbulent insides and into the dancing light, differently malleable than in the air, and the reef began to absorb me: fish and giant clams and brilliantly coloured corals all around, this floating world feeling like a vibrant scene of life. This memory of immersion is what I have to hold onto of the underwater world of Lodestone Reef, since the lovely German boys I met on my dive never sent me their GoPro footage. Lodestone Reef is one of the 2,900 reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Far North Queensland, Australia, which in its entirety spans the equivalent of 70 million football fields. So stunning was the experience, is the memory, that I forgot to sense that the reef was dying. When I came back up to the surface I was nothing but gush about the beauty of it all, to which David, my accompanying dive master, responded with “that’s so nice to hear.” Beautiful is not how the reef is described so much these days: most often it’s “sad”. Baby coral in Australia's Great Barrier Reef have declined by 89% due to mass bleaching in 2016 and 2017 (Hughes 387). Not being attuned to the conditions of the underwater, I had not detected the shifts in its landscape, temperature or acidity. But these shifting conditions were what had taken me to Townsville in the first place; to meet with three scientists working to study and protect the reef, and to immerse my body within it. A number of indigenous groups, including the Wulgurukaba, Bindal, Girrugubba, Warakamai and Nawagi, were living in the Townsville area before being settlers violently dispossessed them in 1864, and the city has since grown to become the largest urban 1 centre of Far North Queensland (Townsville City Council). Over a lunch of fish cakes in the canteen of the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), Dr. Joy Smith told me that these days nearly everybody living in Townsville is either a doctor, a marine biologist, or in the military; a strange nexus of disparate forms of caring about life. The city is the closest regional centre to the proposed Adani thermal coal mine, slated to become the largest coal mine in Australia. The posters I saw lining the streets of Townsville’s centre during my humid four day visit in January were vehement in both support and opposition for the mine—the need for jobs in an area of high unemployment versus our future; our children; our planet—a fight made all the more disquieting set against so much dead coral, quietly gathering layers of algae just offshore. And just when I was feeling as though Townsville was an intense conjuncture in which to be gripped by the planetary tangle of life, death, and crisis of the present, Townsville flooded. At the beginning of February, two weeks after my visit, a monsoon and slow moving tropical low converged by the coast and resulted in record rainfall which, amplified by the mismanagement of dams, devastated the region (Smee). The official death toll was six, although this excludes the approximately 300,000 cows that died on surrounding cattle stations, as well as unknown numbers of less economically quantifiable creatures. The drama of the floods, the mine, and the infamous bleaching of the reef are expressive of planetary force in loud, inundating volumes. The volume at which ocean acidification unfolds requires other kinds of attunement. Turning to acid Chemically, an acid is a compound that releases hydrogen ions (H+) when dissolved in water. Acidity is measured by way of the pH scale, at the other end of which lies base. Danish chemist Søren Peter Lauritz Sørensen invented the pH scale in 1909, a range of 1–14 that is based on a logarithmic formula, (log10[H+]), which means that movement along the scale is exponential. Anything with a pH of less than 7.0 is acidic: the average apple, for instance, has a pH of 3.0, whereas sulphuric (battery) acid has a pH of just 1.0. The pH of human blood must remain within a relatively narrow range of 7.35-7.45 in order to sustain life (Bettelheim et al. 160). The pH of the ocean, by contrast, is currently sitting at 8.1, having fallen from what had been a relatively stable 8.2 since the beginning of the industrial era. Given the logarithmic nature of pH, this drop represents a 25 percent increase in acidity over the past two centuries, thanks to the ocean’s function as a giant sponge for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) released into the atmosphere 2 by the burning of fossil fuels, and to find “a comparable acidification event requires setting our time machine in reverse, going back 55 million years” (Ogden 328). One cannot immediately see OA, or sense it unmediated. A body needs to be immersed over a vast period of time in the ocean to detect this changing chemical environment. It doesn’t immediately manifest in spectacular event-form, like the coral bleaching that results from rising temperatures (although it does impair the coral’s ability to recover from bleaching), nor is it as easy to conceptually and materially isolate and address as an issue like plastic pollution, but the slow, seeping unfolding of this ambient chemistry nonetheless holds all that is tangled in the ocean. Along with being less visible, it is less immediately destructive to marine life than other stressors such as pollution, deep sea mining, and temperature rise, and less apparent as cause for immediate human concern than the issue of sea level rise. Internationally, OA remains unregulated by significant environmental bodies like the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in large part because it remains unclear how to do so, as pH is geographically variable but also the only unit by which to measure acidification (Meyer). OA is a research area still in its infancy. As Peter G. Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) explains in “A short history of ocean acidification science in the 20th century,” knowledge of OA first became possible in 1909 with Sørensen’s creation of the pH scale. The first major study into CO2-induced climate change and ocean chemistry took place in 1938, and by the mid-twentieth century specialists were well aware of the gradual acidification taking place in the oceans as the result of the huge amount atmospheric CO2 that it absorbs, approximately 1 million tons of fossil fuel CO2 per hour, which accounts for nearly 30 percent of atmospheric CO2. This was not appreciated by the grater scientific community for much of the twentieth century, but in the lead up to the first “Ocean in a High CO2 World” meeting, held in Paris in 2004, papers started to accumulate attempting to quantify oceanic CO2, and finally knowledge began to congeal around the phrase ocean acidification (Brewer 7411). Whilst much of the scientific focus throughout the 20th century concerning was geared toward the process of oceanic CO2 uptake as a positive buffer against climate change, it would take until the late 1980s for OA’s harmful effects on marine life to become a matter of concern. Such concern was still only present to a small extent in the first IPCC Scientific Assessment published in 1990, and it wasn’t until the publication of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage in 2002 that these matters were 3 rigorously addressed. When the phrase “ocean acidification” came into usage in 2003 it became an idea with which to monitor and track; a narrative and aesthetic story; and a metric by which other oceanic stressors can be measured. An oceanic turn has also been underway beyond the sciences, evident in the appearance of the “Ocean Space” pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale, and in the rise of theoretical work being gathered until the umbrella of what Steve Mentz in 2009 dubbed the “blue humanities.” It is a turn that has been under way for some time, Laura Winkiel writes in the introduction to the recent special issue of English Language Notes on “Hydro-criticism,” although the task of pinning down origins is inevitably tricky, argues Astrida Neimanis, one prominent figure in this sea of thought. “Just like bodies of water, stories are rarely autochthonous; they usually begin in many places at once, with many unspoken debts” (Neimanis 8).

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