Underground climate: infrastructure, Hollow Earth, and the Anthropocene

Abstract

Early in his meditation on inhumation and history, Urne-Buriall (1658), English polymath Thomas Browne describes the discovery of “between fourty and fifty Urnes” ([1658] 2012, 103) in the sandy soil near Walsingham in the 1650s. Browne refers to the dark interiors of these buried urns as “conservatories” – spaces of conservation, insulated from what he calls “the piercing Atomes of ayre that corrupt the upper world” ([1658] 2012, 112). Browne regarded the underground as a place wherein the law of natural change, the piercing atoms of air was deferred. In the nineteenth century, Browne’s remarks were gradually integrated into the general imaginary of the subsurface: step by step, tunnel after tunnel, literary work after literary work, the underground was perceived as a place where humanity could suspend the corruption of natural change, degeneration, and decay. The underground came to be understood as a conservatory – not for exotic plants and flowers – but for the human; a strictly anthropogenic sphere where the chaos of nature could be suspended. The chaos of nature was in this context often understood as the chaos of climate: global atmospheric events such as the Year Without a Summer in 1816, growing air pollution in the greater cities, the Great Stink of London in 1858, the 1884 eruption of Krakatoa, and the nascence of anthropogenic climate change makes the nineteenth century a fundamental period in the cultural history of climate. In this article, I argue that the desire to control the climate system by artificialisation and insulation begins to be speculatively acted out in the material and symbolic carving out of the new underground. Interrogating representations of underground infrastructure made by popular authors such as Bayard Taylor, engineers such as Louis Simonin, scientists such as Émile Gérards, and painters such as George Jones, we see in the British and French nineteenth century an intensifying image of the underground as a rational, inorganic, and strictly anthropogenic sphere with a controllable climate. No longer a site for imaginary encounters with mythological hellholes, it is perceived as a metaphor for a future world where the climate can be controlled, linearised, and regularised – opposed to the chaotic climate of the surface. Other than the popular sources speculating on the space of underground infrastructure, speculation on the subterranean atmosphere was, most fervent in the