Earth Worlds: Continental Collision as an Elemental Formation

• In Event: Elements: Thinking Our Present Elementally - I

Abstract

Continental collision is a geological process of Earth’s plate tectonics that occurs at convergent boundaries and involves tens of million years of faulting and folding of the crust. Southeastern Anatolia is located in an ongoing continental collision zone, where the Arabian Plate has been colliding with the Eurasian Plate and, squeezing the small Anatolian Plate for the past 30 million years. In this paper, I frame the Arabian-Eurasian tectonic collision as an elemental formation in order to think about the ways in which the element of earth and earthbound processes are entangled with temporal and spatial politics in Southeastern Anatolia, or Turkey’s Kurdistan, which has been a geography of political violence and ethnic conflict for the past century. To explore how the material forces of tectonic collision ground and unsettle political and social worlds, I focus on two geological consequences of the Arabian-Eurasian collision: folding and faulting. Folding has been central to the formation of mountains and volcanic activity, while faulting has given rise to earthquakes and is one of the main reasons oil exploration and extraction is extremely difficult in Turkey. In this paper, I take an earthquake, oil, and a stratovolcano mountain as three separate formations in which the Arabian-Eurasian plate collision’s effects are materialized in earthbound forms in Turkey’s Kurdistan today. In doing so, I lay out the dynamic, catastrophic, and formative forces that characterize earth as well as the differentiated sediments that metaphorically and literally come to compose the earth element in the so-called Turkish Anthropocene. Finally, by tracing the political contestations over territorial space and national time that crystallize around these formations, I examine the links between a planetary process such as tectonic collision, its earthbound consequences such as earthquakes, oil, and mountains, and worldly modes of engaging with these formations such as disaster politics, extractivism, and political violence. This paper, therefore, excavates the tense but generative relationship between planet, earth, and world in our present.

Author

• Zeynep Oguz, Northwestern University