ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Bending the Bottom: The Perdido Fold Belt, Submarine Canyons, and the Role of Private Interest in Shaping and Governing Ocean Grounds

• In Event: Governing the Seas: Ocean Science, International Law, and the Contested Politics of the Post-War Ocean (1 of 2)

English Abstract

In the 2023 documentary Deep Rising, chairman and CEO of The Metals Company (TMC), Gerard Barron, says to an unheard colleague on a phone call that they should be talking to all of the major oil companies because their strategy for seabed mining is not dissimilar from what the oil and gas industry had already done. Like those oil companies, Barron suggests, they must “get the grounds.” What does it mean to “get the grounds,” and how exactly did those companies go about it? My current research seeks to answer this question by foregrounding a case study in the Gulf of Mexico and following it all the way into global ocean governance infrastructure.

The Perdido Fold Belt, in particular, in the Gulf of Mexico’s “ultra-deep water” frontier, was a site of private, submarine knowledge-making and U.S. conceptions of how to govern the ocean’s vertical environment. Based on that knowledge-making, decision-makers before and during Reagan’s administration tried to claim the scientific authority to define the seafloor, what its value was, and who had the right to govern it. Such logics of imperialism and scientific exceptionalism had far-reaching ramifications for human relationships with marine environments and geopolitical power differentials (Fish, 2025). Drawing on scholarship at the intersection of science and technology studies, histories of science and the environment, and critical ocean studies, I argue that experts within and adjacent to petroleum geology and geophysics capitalized on the ocean’s deep and distant material nature to extend U.S. conceptions of a corporate managed commons to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and in the shaping of the International Seabed Authority.

Author

• Samm Newton, University of Wisconsin–Madison