Sea Change: The World Ocean Circulation Experiment and the Productive Limits of Ocean Variability

Abstract

The ability to quantify the relationship between the ocean and the atmosphere is an enduring challenge for global-scale science. This paper analyzes the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE, 1990–2002), an international oceanographic program that aimed to provide data for decadal-scale climate modeling and for the first time produce a “snapshot” of ocean circulation against which future change could be measured. WOCE was an ambitious project that drew on extensive international collaboration and emerging technologies that continue to play a significant role in how the global environment is known and governed. However, a main outcome of WOCE was an encounter with ocean variability: the notion that the ocean is governed not by the circular currents shown in the popular “conveyor-belt” diagram but by eddies, filaments, jets, and other nonlinear forces. This paper suggests the concept of “productive limits” as an analytic for understanding how ocean variability both prompted new forms of knowledge and the development of a global knowledge infrastructure that is contingent, uneven, and fully entwined with geopolitical dynamics.

Who Knows What a Microbe is?

“…Further, this lack of coherence might not be resolved simply by learning more about agricultural microbes, or by implementing one standardised view. That is, the gap between what a microbe is on a label and what a microbe is in a field is not a "productive" form of not-knowing that enables scientists to continue pursuing further epistemic certainty indefinitely (Lehman, 2021;Reinecke and Bimm, 2022). Rather, we argue that sites or regions of microbial unknowability may be a feature of more-than-human agricultural landscapes that current regulatory frameworks have difficulty acknowledging.…”

Ocean environing media

“…WOCE was envisaged as establishing a baseline against which future changes in circulation could be measured, but the results were not as expected. 25 Rather than a baseline, or "snapshot," of global ocean circulation, the project resulted in a realisation of the extent to which the ocean was characterised by variability, complexity and change; a central insight of the decadal research project was that "it may not be possible to know the ocean on a planetary scale." 26 However, this insight, rather than an impasse, led to new ways of thinking about the ocean.…”