Oceanic Pasts,Planetary Futures: Deep-Sea Core Data and Temporal Negotiation in the CLIMAP Project (1971

Abstract

This article explores the temporalities of deep-sea core research in the 1970s and traces how this small scientific field became a site in which geological, environmental, and political times were negotiated in novel ways. Rather than conceiving of deep-sea cores as containers of data, which provide unmediated access to the planetary past, the article shows how the cores were temporally fluid objects which, in the 1970s, were picked up in settings well beyond the ocean sciences. By following the evolution of the deep-sea core project Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction (CLIMAP), which brought together deep-sea core research with climate modeling and economic and agricultural forecasting, the article argues that the ways in which deep-sea core data entered the field of climate modeling mirrored contemporary fears of overpopulation as well as dreams of abundant energy reserves hidden in the seabed.

Even though the deep-sea core scientists spoke of their work as “exploration” or “discovery,” the history of CLIMAP reveals a much more temporally complex enterprise and highlights the instability of planetary and historical times in the postwar era. Drawing on recent developments in time studies as well as the history of the geosciences, the article shows how present theoretical deliberations on the temporalities of the planetary scale can be understood in light of a longer historical process of negotiating multiple temporalities in the geosciences. By considering the history of deep-sea core research in the 1970s as a history of temporal negotiation, the article calls for increased collaboration and engagement between time studies and the history of science.

Keywords

CLIMAP deep-sea core geosciences oceanography planetary temporality

Introduction

In a conference room at the National Science Foundation in Washington D.C. on April 26, 1971, Melvin N.A. Peterson was reaching the end of his presentation. Peterson was the acting director of the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), based at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and had traveled to Washington D.C. to present the progress made in his research program to his biggest funder. The project was a massive scientific undertaking. Its aim was to recover sediment cores from the seafloor around the world. It was at once a scientific project, aimed at better understanding the geologic and climatological history of the seafloor, as well as a part of the increasing interest in oil prospecting in the deep offshore. Peterson ended his presentation by alluding to a longer history of heroic ocean exploration and situated himself and his project within it. Two hundred years ago, Peterson said, James Cook explored two dimensions of the oceans, outlining their perimeters and mapping their horizontal properties. One hundred years ago, he continued, HMS Challenger introduced a vertical dimension, “basically the depths, the broad depth contours of the oceans basins.” Today, he concluded, “one hundred years later, the Glomar Challenger [the research vessel of DSDP] is introducing this third dimension of time. How did the oceans get like they are today?” (Peterson et al., 1971).

Time appeared, in Peterson's presentation, as the next frontier in ocean science. It was a new dimension awaiting discovery. Seen in the light of a longer history of mapping and measuring the seafloor it seems fair to say that Peterson was overstating his case. The geohistorical quality of the seafloor had been of interest to scientists for centuries and the history of ocean basins the subject of intense debates in the decades that preceded Peterson's project (Oreskes, 1999; Rozwadowski, 2008). Yet, as I will argue in this article, the temporalities of the seafloor would be renegotiated in radical ways in the 1970s and enable new temporal connections between deep-sea cores and visions of planetary futures. Rather than merely being “records” of past environmental conditions, the deep-sea cores brought together multiple pasts, presents and futures in their seemingly straight-forward stratigraphic layering (NASA Earth Observatory, 2005; Paglia and Isberg, 2022). By tracing the temporal negotiations in American deep-sea core research in the 1970s, this article explores how the geological and climatological times of deep-sea cores became increasingly synchronized with emergent practices of planetary modeling and neo-Malthusian fears of overpopulation, energy scarcity and food shortages in a decolonializing world (Ranganathan, 2019; Robinson, 2021).

Bringing together the history of the ocean sciences and time studies can provide new ways of approaching the work of ocean scientists and, in the context of deep-sea core research in the 1970s, reveal the multiple temporalities at play in a transformative time for understandings of the spatial and temporal properties of the seafloor—and the planet itself. This has implications beyond the historiography of the ocean sciences. How the temporalities of planetary-scale environmental knowledge are understood in the present, and have been understood in the past, have become increasingly pressing issues. The last two decades have seen a proliferation of scholarship reckoning with a multitemporal present in the tracks of anthropogenic impact on a planetary scale (Chakrabarty, 2019; Clark and Szerszynski, 2020). Deliberations on the Anthropocene concept and other articulations of the planetary have permeated the humanities and sparked intense discussions about how to account for the changing relationship between humanity and the natural environment on a geological scale (Coen and Albritton Jonsson, 2022; Woods, 2023). Scientifically produced timescales, from a wide range of geosciences have, in turn, been at the center of these theoretical discussions about telling the time in an age of dramatic planetary change (Ekström and Bergwik, 2022). These timescales have ended up at the center of these discussions because they show, in Heather Anne Swanson's words, “how seemingly banal time charts are a form of infrastructure that shapes environmental management practices, research agendas, and policy negotiations” (2016: 162).

The historical genealogies of these “seemingly banal time charts” have acquired new dimensions in the discussions that have followed the rise of the Anthropocene concept (Flatø, 2023; Rosenberg and Grafton, 2010). Theoretical deliberations on these issues can often draw on abstracted notions of “deep time,” “geological time,” or “planetary time” (e.g. Kelly, 2019) while the specific circumstances concerning the origins, logics, and epistemological scope of these times are often vague or not thoroughly discussed (Bastian, 2024). In response to calls for “re-entanglement” of natural and human times (Jordheim, 2022) the history of the geosciences offers potentially fruitful approaches to the planetary present. Given the contested relationship between social and natural times, scientific tools of timemaking, such as deep-sea cores, can serve as revealing examples of the materiality and situatedness of planetary temporalization. As Bashford, Bobbette and Kern ask in relation to the “planetary turn” in the humanities and the need to diversify planetary histories: What “new stratigraphies of knowledge and assemblages of meaning become visible in the history of the geosciences?” (2023: 21). In light of the recent interest in planetary temporalities, the history of 1970s deep-sea core research appears as a site in which the boundaries of political, environmental and geological times were continuously renegotiated.

In particular, the article will focus on Climate: Long range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction (CLIMAP) as one such site of temporal negotiation. The project was an offshoot of Peterson's Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) and aimed to utilize deep-sea cores to create models of past planetary conditions, most famously in a model of the last glacial maximum around 18,000 years ago. As the CLIMAP progressed—it was active between 1971 and 1982—it increasingly became a site in which multiple temporalities were drawn together in unprecedented ways (Jordheim, 2014; Sörlin and Isberg, 2021). The scientists in CLIMAP, as I will explore in the article, collaborated with scientists and modelers well beyond their disciplinary confines and found new applications for their data in contexts that had previously been beyond the scope of deep-sea core research. This process was not predetermined. On the contrary, the ways in which the times of deep-sea cores entered the political language of planetary forecasting were contested and interwoven with bigger political geographies of the ocean sciences. As Edelstein et al. (2020: 4) note “… power and time interface amid intensely competitive temporal conflicts, and not simply parallel or layered ones”.

The kinds of conflicts described by Edelstein et al. have often remained in the background in the historiography of ocean sciences. Environmental historians and historians of science have traditionally privileged the spatial over the temporal as the prime category of interest (Antonello and Carey, 2017). For the oceans, this is perhaps not very surprising. Since the birth of modern ocean sciences in the 19th century, finding ways of measuring and accurately map the topography and volume of the ocean has been a prime objective across disciplinary boundaries (Höhler, 2002). This is very much still the case, especially with regards to the seafloor. As of 2023, only 24.9% of the seafloor had been mapped with modern high-resolution technology (NOAA, 2023). However, recent histories of ocean science have highlighted how ways of knowing ocean dynamics have shaped ideas of ocean–climate interaction and how scientific practices and instruments have rendered the ocean a dynamic rather than static environment (Dry, 2019; Lehman, 2020a). Other historical studies have focused on the interwoven relationship between spatial and temporal scales in ocean sciences (Camprubí, 2018). These important contributions mirror a broader interest in the oceans as three-dimensional historical spaces in their own right. In contrast to earlier strands of ocean histories, which often drew on the ocean surface as the relevant spatial category (e.g. Cunliffe, 2017), the depths are increasingly coming into view, not least under the label of “Blue Humanities” (Alaimo, 2019). In an era of immense anthropogenic pressures on the planet, deep environments are human environments too (Camprubí, 2021). The seafloor is no exception. Contemporary debates about deep-sea mining and the potential of exploiting the seafloor to facilitate a “green transition” have once again brought remote depths into the political spotlight (Han, 2024). Similarly, deep-sea cores have become crucial containers of environmental data and underpin dominant modes of knowing and prognosticating planetary climate change (Shevenell et al., 2020).

In this article, I will argue that the 1970s saw the emergence of new temporal connections between deep-sea cores on the one hand, and planetary modeling on the other. These connections were shaped by the temporalities of research funding, fears of energy scarcity and overpopulation and the rise of general circulation models. The results of the CLIMAP project were products of temporal negotiation, of finding ways to reconcile or exclude particular temporal sensibilities and timescales. These negotiations involved both deep-sea core scientists and the surrounding research infrastructure. The case of CLIMAP highlights the contingent ways in which planetary pasts are made to speak to the political present, and how new temporal configurations shape scientific identities (Daston and Sibum, 2003) and research priorities. As Peterson's presentation in 1971 indicates, matters of time were explicitly stated research goals, not a by-product of other objects of inquiry for deep-sea core scientists in the early 1970s. This research focus would enable the deep-sea core scientists to speak to new temporalities, new political issues, and expand their temporal and spatial scope from oceanic pasts to planetary futures.

Cores in context: Temporal imaginaries of the seafloor in the 1970s

Despite Melvin N.A. Peterson's assertion of being on the verge of discovering a new dimension in ocean science, deep-sea cores had existed since the interwar period. Even though they were rudimentary and lacking temporal depth, they were still used for geohistorical research and, as isotope dating methods grew increasingly elaborate in the 1940s, for early paleoclimatological studies of the Pleistocene (Isberg, 2023). The deep-sea core as a scientific object is, however, a quintessential product of the postwar era and its simultaneous commercial and military expansion into the deep ocean (van Keuren, 2004). The influx of resources allowed older theoretical deliberations to be tested in practice and more refined drilling technology to be developed. The proliferation of deep-sea cores in the postwar ocean sciences hinged on two developments: the technological and infrastructural capabilities of large-scale offshore drilling and the emergence of isotope dating technologies, which enabled new ways of conceptualizing time in a wide range of scientific disciplines (Kern, 2020; Rosol, 2015).

As historians of science have shown, the postwar period was a time of dramatic expansion of ocean science. The Cold War is often hailed as the main reason for this expansion, especially in a U.S. setting. The Office for Naval Research, founded in the aftermath of World War II, became both a coordinating body of oceanographic research as well as a way to make sure that military interests were taken into consideration in planning and executing research at sea (Oreskes, 2021). The sea was seen as a “three-dimensional space in which the enemy could prowl unseen in nuclear-powered submarines cloaked by water and ice” (Squire, 2018: 221) and thereby rendered a central priority in the strategic imagination of military planners as well as civilian scientists. But it was not just military interests that shaped the understanding of the seafloor. The first physiographic maps of the topography of the global seafloor were emerging in the early in 1960s and further strengthened the potential of the seafloor as a site of extraction, and, even, human settlements (Squire, 2021). The Cold War offers a rich framework for understanding the ideas and practices of seafloor research in the 1960s and 1970s. The “surveillance imperative” (Roberts and Turchetti, 2014) fueled by geopolitical contestation undoubtedly shaped how the seafloor was made into an object of knowledge.

However, as Jonathan Galka (2023) points out, historians of Cold War ocean science have had a tendency to write a history that overstates the primacy of the Cold War in shaping knowledge production about the deep ocean. As more and more of the seafloor and the deep ocean were mapped and accessed, questions of ownership and jurisdictions rose on the agenda. The United Nations Law of the Sea, with its first charter passed in 1958, became perhaps the most prominent example of an international community trying to establish an order for a space that had previously been beyond the domain of governance and international law (Meyer, 2022). But, as Surhabi Ranganathan (2020) argues, the ways in which the deep ocean entered international legal frameworks were shaped by decolonialization and older hegemonic powers seeking to maintain control of marine resources and potential deep-sea mining. It is a history that rather than being a linear legal process “reveals fluid political geographies, epistemic churn, and alternative models for the extraction and distribution of natural resources” (Ranganathan, 2020: 161).

Deep-sea core drilling matured as a scientific practice at the intersection of these economic and political processes, which shaped not only the daily work of deep-sea core scientists but also the temporal frameworks in which they operated. The revolutionary developments in plate tectonics in the early postwar period had revealed a tectonic timescale in ocean science and radically altered conceptions of the history of ocean basins as well as the planet itself (Oreskes, 1999). By the late 1960s, when the debates over continental drift were beginning to settle, new questions and other timescales were increasingly coming into view. Drilling practices were changing as well. Early attempts to drill through the mantle, most famously in the failed Mohole project of the early 1960s (Bascom, 1961), were losing traction among both research funders and private corporations. The attempts to go big and drill as deep as possible were costly and had not rendered any remarkable results. Instead, both scientific and private interests saw more opportunity in making numerous shallow drillings rather than just a few, very deep and costly ones (Shor, 1985). This was beneficial for oil prospecting, but also for geochronological work beyond plate tectonics, where deep-sea sediments could potentially be used to trace histories of a variety of geophysical, geochemical, and biological processes and their rates of change over millennia.

By the early 1970s, deep-sea core drilling had evolved from a relatively small research endeavor in the 1950s to an integrated part of the booming Cold War ocean science complex. It was also moving beyond a more singular focus on the vast geological timescales of plate tectonics. The DSDP was perhaps the clearest example of this development: it involved both oil corporations and leading research institutions in the United States and it had its own research ship dedicated to the recovery of deep-sea cores (Martínez-Rius, 2022). The ship had the telling name Glomar Challenger, where Glomar came from the sponsoring oil corporation Global Marine and Challenger alluded to the 19th British Challenger expedition. Oil prospecting and heroic exploration stood side by side (Priest, 2009). For oil corporations, engaging with deep-sea core research had multiple benefits: by collaborating with ocean scientists, they could develop new drilling technology, experiment with satellite navigation and dynamic positioning for ships and incrementally push the boundaries of oil prospecting further offshore. Scientific cofunding was an appealing prospect for companies who at once were risk-averse but still wanted to reach coastal oil preserves that had previously been out of reach (van Keuren, 2004).

For deep-sea core research, another central scientific development was the rise of General Circulation Models (GCMs) in climate science. Climate was, during this time, becoming a different kind of scientific object. It was increasingly seen as an experimental object of study, which could be tested and simulated with new computer models (Edwards, 2010). The turn towards theory-driven rather than data-driven climate science opened up new global perspectives and an increased pronunciation on future forecasting. Climate modeling experienced “a deep cultural shift” (Heymann and Dahan Dalmedico, 2019: 5) in the 1970s, as environmental concerns became a central focal point and fostered new norms for applied science in a tumultuous time (e.g., Egan, 2017; SMIC, 1971). This new orientation in climate modeling was part of a broader turn toward structuring expert communities for addressing future risks and uncertainties and increased calls for integrating the long term in societal planning (Andersson and Rindzevičiūtė, 2015). Deep-sea core research, which similarly to climate modeling had previously not engaged directly with environmental concerns and societal futures, would find new points of connections with modeling, and also with the future as a temporal category. The prospective temporal modality of anthropogenic planetary impact posed both an epistemological challenge and a research opportunity for deep-sea core research in the early 1970s (Flatø and Isberg, 2023).

The DSDP would, at least in part, respond to this challenge. The project recovered close to 18,000 deep-sea cores from around the world and enabled the emergence of large-scale datasets based on core samples. The abundance of cores would, in turn, enable a more theoretical approach to deep-sea core research, which would draw on the existing core collections rather than attempting to recover new ones at sea. CLIMAP, as I will explore in the next sections of this article, was an off shoot the DSDP and helped forge new temporal and institutional connections between deep-sea core data and planetary modeling.

The origins of CLIMAP

According to James Hays, a paleoceanographer who was one of the founding members of CLIMAP, the idea behind the project came to him while he was a researcher in the DSDP. Hays was onboard the research ship Glomar Challenger when the idea of making better use of the immense number of recovered cores began to, in his recollection, grow on him (Doel, 1997). Creating a project that would not focus on drilling, but rather the already existing material, to develop new forms of deep-sea core analysis appeared to Hays as an interesting possibility. The project could use deep-sea cores to make inferences in matters such as temperature and circulation patterns of surface waters, the chemical nature of bottom water and the distribution of sea ice coverage in recent geological history (Hays, 2009). It also had the potential to open up new sources of funding. By connecting deep-sea core research to the larger, and growing, scientific enterprise of forecasting future environmental conditions, Hays saw an opportunity to align the temporalities of deep-sea core research with a shifting research landscape. In particular, the forthcoming International Decade of Ocean Exploration (IDOE) seemed to provide a new arena for deep-sea cores.

The intellectual origins of the IDOE can be located in mid-1960s U.S. ocean science policy. The IDOE was not a project of the academic scientific community, but instead had its home in the U.S. state bureaucracy and the National Council of Marine Resources and Engineering (Jennings, 2000). In 1966, the Panel on Oceanography of the President's Science Advisory Committee in the United States released the report Effective Use of the Sea. It defined the most important goals for U.S. oceanography to enable “effective use of the sea by man for all purposes currently considered for the terrestrial environment: commerce; industry, recreation and settlement; as well as knowledge and understanding” (Panel on Oceanography of the President's Science Advisory Committee, 1966). Rather than conceiving of the oceans as yet another arena for competition, the report framed ocean science in an international and collaborative manner, much in the same spirit as the United Nations Law of the Sea. But the political geographies of ocean science were fraught and interwoven with geopolitical and economic tensions. The UNESCO leadership for the IDOE had to navigate intense debates around decolonialization and calls for the increased exploitation of ocean resources, which often challenged the scientific and political optimism that the IDOE sought to encourage (Hamblin, 2005).

The IDOE was also envisioning a new kind of ocean science. A key imperative of the decade was to step away from “descriptive” oceanography and turn toward an “applied” ocean science, in which science should lay the groundwork for a utility-oriented way of knowing the world ocean. The 1969 report An Oceanic Quest: The International Decade of Ocean Exploration was written by a committee of U.S. scientists from oceanography and ocean engineering in order to sketch the main goals of the IDOE. It is a revealing example of how a particular kind of temporalization of ocean knowledge was taking shape. A returning phrase in the report is the ambition to lay the groundwork for “rational ocean utilization” on a large scale. In the preface to the report, the Steering Committee members outlined their ambitions for the IDOE and, by doing so, also implicitly altered the temporal priorities of ocean science:

During the past decade, marine science has been pursued with the principal goal of gaining fundamental understanding of ocean processes. Although this goal has not been fully achieved, important progress has been made. We consider it appropriate that in the coming decade, emphasis should be given to the goals of prediction and of enhanced and rational utilization. In subsequent years, accumulated knowledge should ultimately lead to the enlightened and responsible stewardship of our ocean heritage. (National Research Council, 1969, italics mine)

For James Hays and his colleagues, the notion of “the goals of prediction and of enlightened and responsible stewardship” articulated a new potential domain of deep-sea core research. Could the geohistorical timescales of previous studies be meaningfully activated in this call for prediction and utilization? There were massive funding imperatives to find a way to connect the deep time of the cores with the future-oriented research program proposed by the IDOE. By providing a long-term baseline for models of future conditions, CLIMAP could find a niche within this broader framework.

Different strands of ocean science would contribute with different knowledge, but also different timescales: two other major projects of the IDOE were also concerned with establishing baselines and underpinning modeling efforts. The Mid-Ocean Dynamics Experiment (MODE) was mostly concerned with eddies and currents and the Geochemical Ocean Sections Study (GEOSECS) used isotopic tracers to map and model the chemical composition of the world ocean (Broecker and Peng, 1982; Lehman, 2020b). MODE and GEOSECS had shorter temporal scopes and were more concerned with the ocean itself rather than the ocean floor. Nevertheless, these projects were part of a geophysical and geochemical temporalization of the world ocean, which in turn also differed from the temporalities of biological oceanography that had its own separate section of the IDOE framework (Knaus, 2000).

On August 3, 1970, a proposal entitled “The History and Development of the World Ocean” was submitted to the NSF (Meyer, 1970). “Very large sums of money have been spent on gathering the cores,” Hays wrote to the NSF, “it seems appropriate that some sort of organizational effort, even though a small one, be devoted to the long term research on these cores” (Hays, 1970). The proposed project would approach deep-sea cores through the already existing storage facilities at LDGO, Scripps, and other oceanographic institutions in the United States, rather than engaging in recovering new ones. By aiming to make more qualitative studies of the cores, and apply a wider range of dating methods, detailed biostratigraphical knowledge could, Hays argued, be produced. This knowledge would be “fundamental to understanding natural fluctuations of the environment and will serve as a basis for assessing technological modifications of the environment” (Hays, 1970).

The NSF only partly approved of the proposal. But Hays assertion that knowing the past environment through the cores was possible to combine with the objective to predict future conditions did catch their attention. The proposed work on paleoclimatology and paleomagnetism, rather than the longer geological timescales that was also part of the proposal, was deemed the most interesting. The long geological timescales—ranging millions of years back in time—did not fit within the future oriented research agenda. The times of deep-sea core research had to be recalibrated. The NSF suggested that a group of scientists in the proposal—James Hays, Andy McIntyre, and Neil Opdyke from LDGO and John Imbrie from Brown University—should join forces with two colleagues from the University of Oregon, Ross Heath and Ted Moore, who had similar research interests, and form a new project of their own.

The timescales this group of scientists were operating on, the NSF argued, was the reason for why they were deemed worthy of funding. The need for the projects to be of use for mankind was a core tenant of the IDOE (Doel, 1997). The temporal scope needed to adhere to this prerogative. Earlier geological surveys of the ocean floor—such as the debates about continental drift and the geological origins of ocean basins—had operated on timescales reaching tens, and sometimes hundreds, of million years back into the past to the breakup of the supercontinent Pangea (Oreskes, 1999). Paleomagnetic surveys, using deep-sea cores, had also operated on longer timescales up to 5 million years, which was also deemed too distant to be relevant for the IDOE. The scientists decided to narrow down the temporal range of the project to 700,000 years, which is the time passed since the last magnetic reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. This allowed paleomagnetism to be a part of the study, while still being temporally confined to a relatively short timescale (Hays et al., 1969).

The project was placed within the Environmental Forecasting section of the IDOE, which had as its aim to “provide the scientific base to improve environmental forecasting, which requires a repetition of observations, development of realistic (predictive) models, and understanding of physical principles” (Office for the International Decade of Ocean Exploration at the National Science Foundation, 1972). In this setting, CLIMAP would provide long term data over patterns of climatic fluctuations. By studying deep-sea cores already recovered, the project could trace “surface oceanic climatic fluctuations associated with glacial and interglacial transitions” and the aim was to produce “four planetary maps that would show the conditions at different moments in geological history” (Office for the International Decade of Ocean Exploration at the National Science Foundation, 1972).¹ The historical data could serve as a baseline for predicting atmospheric circulation, anthropogenic environmental impact and sea ice coverage in the near future, and speak to the general circulation models developing rapidly at the time. The kind of temporal jumps—from the Pleistocene to the present—that CLIMAP set out to achieve was a product of a broader experimental turn in ways of knowing the climate through computer models and simulations (Edwards, 2010).

Three years into the project, in 1974, the engagement with the climate modelers grew more pronounced. John Imbire, a founding member of CLIMAP, and an internationally renowned expert on ice ages (Imbrie and Imbrie, 1979), set out to host meetings with climate modelers, seeking to find common ground as well as advertising the relevance of deep-sea core data in the development of general circulation models. By 1974, the project had grown larger—it involved more researchers, more cores, and it was gaining international collaborators—but it was at the same time questioning the vast geomagnetic timescale that the project had set out to explore in 1970.

Shifting temporal priorities

On June 25, 1974, a small group of CLIMAP affiliated scientists met at the University of Maine campus in Orono. CLIMAPs future was on the agenda. Many of the key issues revolved around time and temporality and were sparked by their increased collaboration with climate modelers. “How many climates are needed to yield satisfactory data base for climatic prediction?” and “What are the problems in choosing and documenting these climates?” were two key questions for the group to answer (McIntyre, 1974). Finding a temporal framework that would work for both climate modelers and the CLIMAP members had emerged as one of the central issues for the project to solve. They also had to determine which kinds of climate data—“temperature, salinity, ice volume, sea level, land albedo, wind directions, vegetation, etc.”—were the most important to this end (McIntyre, 1974). Climate was, in other words, not equivalent to temperature or sea ice coverage, even though they were crucial metrics. However, climate models necessitated particular data, which could serve as input to the planetary prediction CLIMAP and the IDOE sought to make possible.

The long timescale to the last reversal of the Earth's magnetic field was appearing as a problem. As the temporalities of the project were becoming increasingly future and climate oriented, the pasts visible in the cores were interpreted in new ways. John Imbrie raised his concerns: “is it necessary to go back to 700,000 years to understand the history of climate—at least those climates that we expect to occur in the near future?” (Imbrie, 1974). Negotiating temporality—or overcoming what Cameron Allan McKean (2024) calls “dimensional friction”—became a crucial task to make the past useable for future prognostication (Coen, 2021).

One result of the focus on climate models was the CLIMAP sub-project “18,000 YBP Experiment,” with Imbrie as the principal investigator. The goal was to produce a map of global ocean surface temperature 18,000 years ago, which was also becoming the most important timeframe of the project. The 18,000 YBP Experiment was seen as a scientific opportunity to create better climate models, by using the detailed data on sea ice coverage made available through enhanced core analysis developed by members of the project (Shackleton, 1967), as well as a way to make CLIMAP adhere better to the goals of IDOE. Imbrie drafted an internal memo, which he named the “CLIMAP Game Plan,” where he noted how the turn towards models enabled new connections between geochronology and modeling. “A series of numerical modelling experiments are planned which will input geologic data first to numerical models of the atmosphere (the RAND version of the Minz-Arakawa general circulation model); and later to coupled atmosphere-ocean models” (Imbrie, 1974). The geological language of, as Imbrie put it, “chronologic patterns of climate change” were to be inserted into the computerized language of GCMs. The RAND corporation emerged as a collaborating institution and further strengthened the future-oriented research agenda of CLIMAP (Turnbull, 2023). By modeling climate conditions by using primarily deep-sea core data—as well as additional data from ice cores, pollen samples and soil profiles—the experiment had two main objectives: firstly, to determine climatic conditions (sea level, sea ice coverage, temperature and land albedo) of the Earth at the last glacial maximum, but also to test the sensibilities of GCMs by feeding them historical data which could be contrasted to instrumental climate records in the present (Imbrie, 1974; CLIMAP Project Members, 1976).

Imbrie's “Game Plan” is an indicative example of how the times of deep-sea core research would not only move toward attempts at predicting the future and test the limits of GCM simulations. They would do so in a particular framework. The RAND Corporation's visions of modeling and governing the future could be made to adhere to deep-sea core data analysis. The activities of CLIMAP researchers after the 1974 Orono meeting are indicative of a political agenda in which the oceans were seen as a resource subject to “rational utilization,” under looming threat, from a Western perspective, of a potential decolonial world order and emergent fears of food and energy shortages in the tracks of the 1973 oil crisis (Ranganathan, 2020).

Especially food, and the threats to agriculture and global food supply posed by environmental changes, appeared in several events organized by members of the CLIMAP project. George Kukla, a paleoclimatologist who had joined the project, arranged a session at the 1974 meeting for the American Association of the Advancement of Science. It had the title “To Feed the World: What to Do with Changing Climate” (Hays and Imbrie, 1974) and is a telling example of how climate and food security became two interwoven issues in the early 1970s (Naylor, 2022). The all-day session consisted of presentations about conclusions that could be drawn from the historical and geological record as well as the potential of “stabilizing” the climate through human intervention and geoengineering schemes. The arrangement of this particular session had political reasons as well: it was beneficial for CLIMAP to show that they were relevant in prognosticating different future issues, as they were a part of the Environmental Forecasting program of the IDOE (Hays and Imbrie, 1974). It showcased at once the future-making capacities of deep-sea core data as well as their utility in a political context in which overpopulation was emerging as a key political issue.

The synchronization of deep-sea core temporalities with the future of the world's food production was a remarkable development for scientists who were used with dealing with vastly different timescales. The magnitude of the move from deep pasts to food security, and the temporal and disciplinary jumps it entailed, was discussed by the scientists themselves. In an internal memo, John Imbrie and James Hays recalled one of their first meetings in 1970. Andy McIntyre had suggested including a long-range goal of the project: “to cap our paleoclimatic efforts with a set of economic and agricultural impact statements.” He had asserted that in the future, their limited disciplinary line-up would not suffice. They would, McIntyre had argued, need to enroll economists and agronomists to their project in order to “translate our maps of ancient equilibrium climates into humanistic terms” (Hays and Imbrie, 1974). Hays and Imbrie found this development remarkable:

At the time this vision seemed to some a pipe-dream – and our friends at IDOE probably passed the idea off as a flight of proposal-writing fancy, not quite as wild as our plan to conduct experiments with global circulation models, perhaps, but still an idea of more rhetorical than scientific value. The over-all impact of Kukla's symposium was to remove the smoke from this dream. If we want to do it, we can – not alone, of course, but as part of a broader effort, with modellers and others. (Hays and Imbrie, 1974)

New connections were being made between disciplines, technologies and temporalities that had previously been separated. This sparked new questions for Hays and Imbrie: “Do we really want to get involved?” they asked themselves, referring to attempts of model future climatic conditions, and “if so, when and with whom? At what point would IDOE officials say we were going beyond their charter?” (Hays and Imbrie, 1974).

The worries about going “beyond their charter” were essentially temporal concerns. What kind of temporalities, and what kind of futures, should be in focus in the CLIMAP project? The notion of translating deep-sea core data into “humanistic terms” is a telling example of how synchronization unfolded in very concrete way. But it is also an example of how research policy and the objectives of the IDOE as well as broader societal trends such as neo-Malthusian fears of overpopulation shaped the scientific production of time. Even though the CLIMAP scientists were clearly aware of the risk of taking on issues “beyond their charter,” the mid 1970s was a time of expansive visions for deep-sea core research as well as paleoclimatology more generally.

The perhaps most stark example of how deep-sea core data were made to speak on vastly different registers and political arenas is the 1975 “First Miami Conference on Isotope Climatology and Paleoclimatology.” It was hosted by Cesare Emiliani and W.F. Libby, who had spearheaded isotope dating of deep-sea cores already in the 1940s and 1950s, but several CLIMAP researchers were involved in organizing the conference as well (Libby, 1976). The conference proceedings framed paleoclimatology as an urgently needed science for avoiding future catastrophes and taking on “pressing problems of climate change.” The organizers put it bluntly: “If energy is today's crisis, food will be the crisis of tomorrow. Because the global food supply depends primarily on climate, current understanding of climate must be vastly improved in order to meet the challenge of tomorrow” (Emiliani and Libby, 1976). The conference participants decided to work towards an “International Decade of Isotope Climatology,” drawing on the ongoing IDOE, and to launch a research program which would situate paleoclimatologists as the scientists best equipped to take on a looming food crisis. The “International Decade of Isotope Climatology” never materialized. Other communities of scientists—most often related to climate modeling—would become the central knowledge producers as the global climate was formalized as a scientific and political object. They would utilize paleoclimate data without producing it themselves (Heymann and Dahan Dalmedico, 2019).

In 1976, CLIMAP published its simulation of the last glacial maximum in the article “The Surface of Ice Age Earth” (CLIMAP Project Members, 1976). The article was a landmark achievement in the entanglement of climate modeling and deep-sea core data and the result of the “game plan” John Imbrie had outlined two years earlier. In the article, CLIMAP drew primarily on deep-sea core data concerning sea-surface temperature and sea-ice coverage, but also added pollen sample data for mapping land albedo. The data were compiled to work with a general circulation model provided by the RAND Corporation and the climate modeler W. Lawrence Gates, who found the paleoclimate data useful for testing his model on an entirely different dataset. The map presented in the article was a combination of new isotope dating methods, datafication of seafloor sediments and the efforts of modelers such as Gates. The collaboration with RAND is an example of how deep-sea cores went from a remote existence as a subdiscipline in the ocean sciences in the 1960s to becoming tools for a technocratic vision of modeling the future by the mid-1970s (Gates, 1976: Manabe and Hahn, 1977). CLIMAP would produce similar maps in the years that followed (CLIMAP Project Members, 1982) and its data collection a staple in paleoclimatological research for decades. The temporal jumps that by the early 1970s were seen as remarkable by the CLIMAP scientists themselves were increasingly becoming common practice in climate modeling and, by the late 1980s, in Earth System Science as well.

Conclusion

By zooming in on the activities of the CLIMAP project in the 1970s, this article brought forward how deep-sea core research shifted its temporal sensibilities and priorities during a few formative years. While the scientists themselves first spoke of “discovering” time in the oceans, they quickly entered a much more multitemporal research landscape and had to reconcile their temporal frameworks with that of political interests, climate modelers and visions of using the cores for economic and agricultural forecasting. The temporal shift—from oceanic pasts to modeled planetary futures—enabled new connections between deep-sea cores and actors such as the RAND Corporation, as well as societal issues more broadly. It drew together deep-sea cores with emergent fears of overpopulation and decreasing food security as well as the scramble for offshore oil and mineral reserves in the seabed.

CLIMAP gradually became a project concerned with timing planetary dynamics and anthropogenic impacts. While the forecasting component had been integral to the project since it started, the complexity of this task grew rapidly in the early 1970s. When James Hays and John Imbrie speculated in 1974 about how they could “translate our maps of ancient equilibrium climates into humanistic terms,” they reflected upon a remarkable development in which their research practices were entering discussions about the fate of humanity on an unstable planet. By bringing attention to the specific timescales and political priorities of the “humanistic terms” CLIMAP sought to approach, the article shows how the deep-sea core data were interpreted in light of fears of energy scarcity and decreasing food security as well as techno-optimist ideals of “rational utilization” of the world ocean. Research funding also played an important role in shaping the temporalities of CLIMAP: the strong emphasis on forecasting in the IDOE and increased interest in general circulation models brought particular metrics and timescales into view and rendered others invisible. The increased focus on sea-ice coverage and temperature, rather than vegetation, fauna or salinity, is one example of how the imperatives of climate models at the time shaped the scientific production of time in deep-sea core research.

Geology is always, as James Secord puts it, embedded in geopolitics (2018). Recently, historians of science have brought forward how this is also true the other way around: geopolitics is expressed through geology and planetary temporalization (Simpson, 2024). CLIMAP—which straddled the boundaries between geological, environmental and political times—is no exception. It was a project that interpreted the sedimentary record of the seafloor, but it also activated it in a particular place and time. As abstract notions of “planetary time” or “deep time” abound in humanities research and societal debates at large, following how geoscientific timescales enter political frameworks is worthy of scholarly attention. Sophia Roosth, in her study of contemporary stratigraphers, brings forward how geological time is a product of evaluating synchronicities and disjunctures to “tether together contingent temporal objects into something approaching a global timescale” (Roosth, 2022: 713). In this article, I have argued that deep-sea core data in the CLIMAP project functioned in a similar way: mapping the surface of ice age Earth—and connecting it to potential planetary futures—was a task that required constant temporal negotiation and selection of data, as well as new research infrastructures, political priorities and the rise of global circulation models. It takes work to temporalize the planet. History of science and time studies can benefit from closer interaction in order to situate and historicize this work—and to imagine how it could be conducted in other ways.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I want to thank the special issue editor and contributors as well as the two anonymous reviewers for insightful feedback during the writing process. Thank you also Sverker Sörlin, Sabine Höhler, Adam Wickberg and Richard Staley for commenting on earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the H2020 European Research Council, Grant Agreement No. 787516 for the project: “Study of the Planetary Human-Earth Relationship (SPHERE): The Rise of Global Environmental Governance”.

ORCID iD

Erik Isberg

Notes

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Oceanic Pasts,Planetary Futures: Deep-Sea Core Data and Temporal Negotiation in the CLIMAP Project (1971–1982)

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Cores in context: Temporal imaginaries of the seafloor in the 1970s

The origins of CLIMAP

Shifting temporal priorities

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References