"The nodules are alive and well on the sea floor": deep ocean minerals, invertebrate traces, and multispecies histories of abyssal environments.

Abstract

For mid-twentieth century scientists, industrialists, politicians, and lawyers, manganese (polymetallic) nodules were singular and valuable condensations of complex and little-understood biogeochemical processes. This paper examines how those processes were made tractable objects of interdisciplinary scientific inquiry in the mid-twentieth century, and how the study of those processes required the importation of biological and ecological concepts into the research of geochemistry at sea. Though largely falling away by the 1980s, the study of eukaryotic life on and in nodules was a lively area of research after the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958) and especially during the 1970s, when the US National Science Foundation funded a large, inter-university program on the study of manganese nodules to answer basic questions about ore formation and origin. Sorting out how deep-sea rocks generated and grew into valuable deposits required parsing life's patterns-rhythmic growth, cycles of metabolism, evolution, death and organic decay-from geological processes. I story how scientists came to interpret nodules as created and maintained amid hybrid biological-geological agencies. Building on work in multispecies and animal history, I articulate a multispecies methodology for taking mid-century nodule science as shot through with interspecies encounter, producing an archive co-authored with invertebrates. Both enabled and frustrated by organisms, abyssal resources and environments emerged into legibility together, within frames of oceanic resource extraction. Given renewed contemporary exigencies of deep-sea mining, this article reaches further across literary criticism, more-than-human history, and science & technology studies to expand the methodological terrain on which marine multispecies histories might draw.