ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Making Oceanic Climate

• In Event: Making Global Temperature Across Land, Ice and Oceans

English Abstract

This paper examines how the oceans became sites where temperature was measured, debated, and contested as a climatic index between the seventeenth century and the late nineteenth century. I argue that techniques for observing temperature and circulation at sea emerged through the interplay of empirical practice, instrumentation, and geopolitical ambition, and that these practices reveal the plurality of “climates” operating across different communities, from mariners and hydrographers to natural philosophers and naval states.
Revisiting early observational programmes, from Lawrence Rooke’s Directions and Robert Boyle’s seawater experiments to Banks’s and Scoresby’s thermometric work, I show how attempts to quantify the seas produced diverse and sometimes incompatible indices of oceanic climate. Maury’s wind and current charts exemplify this moment of epistemic multiplicity: by standardising logbook data, he sought to impose global coherence on highly localised temperature and weather observations, thereby claiming new forms of globality across the world’s oceans.
The paper then reconsiders the Challenger expedition (1872–76) as a pivotal episode in which deep-sea temperature measurements destabilised long-standing assumptions about ocean structure and circulation. Rather than producing a single authoritative index, Challenger exposed the limits, contradictions, and ambiguities of thermometric knowledge at depth. By tracing how different proxies, instruments, and institutional priorities shaped what counted as “temperature” at sea, the paper situates oceanographic practices within the wider nineteenth-century struggle to determine which climatic measures mattered, for whom, and to what ends.

Author

• Sam Robinson, York