Temporal volumes and dimensional friction in a coral core laboratory

In the 20th century, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef emerged as a political battleground when governing bodies planned to turn its coral territories into a vast mining zone. But in the 21st century, as the temporalisation of the Reef exerts increasing influence on the governance, securitisation and a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inTime & society Vol. 33; no. 3; pp. 251 - 282
Main Author McKean, Cameron Allan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.08.2024
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
20th century
21st century
Colonies & territories
Friction
Governance
Laboratories
Minerals
Securitization
Time
volume
verticality
climate proxies
coral reefs
Anticipation
proxy records
laboratory work
multispecies ethnography
climate science
coral coring
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Summary:In the 20th century, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef emerged as a political battleground when governing bodies planned to turn its coral territories into a vast mining zone. But in the 21st century, as the temporalisation of the Reef exerts increasing influence on the governance, securitisation and anticipation of planetary futures, coral time has emerged as a new site of political and imaginative conflict. Responding to this shift from territory to temporality, how can we pay closer attention to those skilfully making coral time? In this article, I introduce ‘dimensional friction’ as a tool for considering how the temporal structure of corals intersects with the temporal structure of global climate science in a coring laboratory. Based on my fieldwork at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, I analyse simultaneously discursive, technical, and imaginative problems that emerge when scientists transform the mineral skeletons of corals into time data. Dimensional friction appears whenever this skeletal matter is manipulated, surfacing the lab-based production of vertical time-depth but also suggesting other ways of temporalising (and corporally appropriating) coral time. Viewed in this way, coral cores might be better understood as ‘temporal volumes’ rather than chronostratigraphic records amenable to linear timelines and trajectories.
ISSN:0961-463X
1461-7463
DOI:10.1177/0961463X241260772