Talk: "The Water Next Time: Changing Wavescapes in the Anthropocene"
By Professor at MIT Stefan Helmreich. Organised by Alien Energy.
Do ocean waves have a history? The question may sound odd: surely waves are simple facts of nature, matters of the substance of the sea. Waves may have diverse manifestations in marine and maritime lore, a variety of effects on economic and political enterprise, and a range of meanings for fishers, surfers, and swimmers. But as formal and material entities, the standard view might say, they are best known by a science arriving at ever-improving models of oscillation, undulation, and movement.
Historians of oceanography have complicated such a view, documenting the changing systems through which scientists and seafarers have known waves. This presentation will go further, looking toward a future in which waves are not only known differently (though new kinds of computer modeling, for example) but also become differently composed material phenomena than once they were.
Today's wave scientists and modelers are predicting that climate change may not only transform the global distribution of significant wave heights, but also may also amplify the frequency of rogue or freak waves, changing the world's wavescape. Others turn to waves as new sources of energy.
This presentation will deliver a history of ocean wave modeling in order to anchor an ethnographic report on how scientists think about whether waves may be transforming - or remade - in synchrony with the political, economic, and social scene of the Anthropocene.
The research project "Marine Renewable Energy as Alien: Social Studies of an Emerging Industry" is sponsored by the Independent Research Councils (DFF). For more information, please visit alienenergy.dk.