ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Whose ‘Geophysics’? Petroleum Prospecting and Planetary Data in Interwar Geophysical Research

• In Event: Universal Claims and Their Consequences in the 20th- and 21st-Century Earth and Climate Sciences

English Abstract

As World War I was coming to an end, the war had affected the organization of science as well as the scales of scientific inquiry: wartime resource committees, submarines and airplanes, and the catastrophic consequences of total war had brought the planet, as a singular object of knowledge, into view in an unprecedented way. It was at this moment in time that geophysics, a previously sparsely used concept, began spreading across scientific, diplomatic and commercial domains. In this paper, I explore the rise of the geophysics concept in the interwar period and how its multiple meanings affected both its scientific institutionalization as well as the planet as an object of knowledge and extraction. With its theoretical anchoring in physics and practical applications in the extractive industries, geophysics was able to acquire currency in both academia and industry, and appear as an appealing way to bring together scientists with different national and disciplinary backgrounds.

By understanding the history of geophysics not solely as a part of the history of physics, but as a history of early environmental science, the paper explores the implications of the blurry boundaries between “pure” and “applied” geophysics. I argue that the rise of geophysical petroleum prospecting had wide-reaching implications for data management practices, technological infrastructures and research questions well beyond the oil industry. This mattered for what kind of planet geophysics made visible. In stressing unity, quantification and reduction, this paper argues that geophysics at once broadened and limited the planetary imagination, and traces its epistemological underpinnings to a broader turn towards data standardization and new commodity frontiers in the interwar period.

Author

• Erik Isberg, KTH Royal Institute of Technology