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The digital coral reef

Fri, August 22, 8:30 to 10:30am, Intercontinental Hotel, Miró

Abstract

The seabed off Norway – stretching from the North Sea up to the Arctic area – is home to the world’s largest population of the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa. Lophelia provides a habitat for rich marine ecosystems. Meanwhile, oil and gas offshore operations are stretching nearby the coral reefs. Lophelia therefore poses a significant risk for operators, raising tensions with the environmental associations and the fishery industry. However, no comprehensive environmental regulations are available today and new challenges emerge as operations expand to the unpredictable Arctic region, triggering debates in the Norwegian socio-political discourse.
Oil and gas offshore operations have recently evolved significantly. Fuelled by the trend towards unmanned, sensor-based, remotely operated subsea facilities, they are gradually displacing the rough-neck, handcraft tradition with an increasingly information-intensive, collaborative mode of working.
Empirically, we illustrate a longitudinal study of an oil and gas company to develop an information infrastructure for real-time subsea environmental monitoring. Methodologically, we take an infrastructural inversion where we describe the company’s practical steps to make the environment measurable and part of a practice as a platform is being built around it.
A key question is in what format, to whom, and in which circumstances the corals are given a “voice”. We present early attempts to give visibility (voice) to the corals through institutionally recognized representations of risk (matrices, algorithms, map layers). Ethical, political, and practical aspects of environmental concerns (including the corals) presently have few established avenues to travel through hence tend to get translated into concerns of risk.

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