Situated in plurality and opacity through embracing the unknownable, Nodular Fathoming (NF) is a worldbuilding process to both engage the opaque realities and deep uncertainties of the future of our ocean planet and refuse the homogenous (heroic, extractive, and inhumane) narratives that claim to know better and more thoroughly; yet, fuel endings of worlds. It proposes understanding our water world on its own terms by contemplating alongside its most mysterious, abundant, and essential environment, the ocean. By embracing the ocean's inherent fragmented, plural, thick, and trans-scalar coexistence, NF becomes a speculative storytelling device to fabulate within the unknowns of abyss(m)al times.

How has knowing the ocean been historically approached by science, industry and government?

Human exploration has attempted and continually strives to know the ocean with certainty through scientific knowledge production, which necessitates acts of exploration, mapping, collection, classification, quantification, mapping, modelling, and simulating. Objects of study are extracted, disembodied, and vivisected, displaced from their original environments with the hope of knowing them more fully. As measurements and models simulate and imitate worlds, cuts made to study and replicate one aspect of a phenomenon bifurcate and rift, creating knowns and their shadow traces, the unknowns. Scientific tools are limited in their ability to mediate realities of shifting, erupting, ooze-covered ocean floors, where sunlight cannot reach, attempts to know fully fall short and these shadow traces endure.  Targets to map the entire seabed by 2030 and digital ocean twins further abstract wet worlds with conventions of land-based technology. The knowledge produced by such mapping endeavors facilitate the increasing parceling, exploitation, and commodification of the ocean through human agency, as the ocean is divided into grids and worlds. 

Why is telling other and plural stories critical for the future of the ocean?

To hold space for the unknowable and embrace the innate resistance of somethings to being fully known, goes against the dominant paradigm of Science, which strives to resolve unknowns and uncertainty through continuous, ‘objective’ knowledge production. Saturated with deep uncertainties, contemporary climate and environmental issues connected to the ocean remain trans-scalar, tangled, and only partly visible. Global ecological, social, economic, and political decision-making is interlinked intimately with ocean futures. Yet, geologic timescales of impact and immense complexity of the interwoven global crises lay outside of human comprehension. Plans fall short and fail to acknowledge present realities with humility. Challenges surround communication in articulating the gravity of concerns, connecting emotionally, and mobilizing action. This suggests a different approach to storytelling is needed.

Why polymetallic nodules?

The human discovery and categorization of polymetallic nodules has been credited to the 19th century HMS Challenger expedition, recorded in the exploration Report on the Deep-Sea Deposits (1891). The masses are part of a new horizon for extractive fantasies and oceanic  ‘land’ claims, which began in the 1970s. As the targets of prospectors, they are objectified as ‘critical’  minerals – singular and essential resources to serve humanity in the green energy transition for sustained urban futures. Immense energy and environmental damage would be expended for extraction of the nodules from their abyssal environments and for extractive metallurgy to separate complex geochemical assemblies into commodified elements (nickel sulfate, cobalt sulfate, copper, manganese). Nevertheless, the future is already being claimed and rendered as “metallic” by mining companies and design consultants, as oil drill ships are converted into polymetallic nodule collection vessels. While replacement nodules, underwater cables, pipelines, and violent fishing practices troll the ocean floor, companies invest in the further development of technologies to exploit deep sea environments. Science still has not reached a deep understanding how nodules relate to life and planetary systems. Findings that complicate and slow the efficiency of master plans are refuted with crafted rebuttals--both claiming scientific truths. Private enterprises make moves to operate outside of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) and UNCLOS (who although holding immense importance for global solidarity, have little ability to enforce when diplomacy fails). In spite of these attempts, the nodules themselves and the environment they inhabit resist being essentialized and fully knowable. They remain complex, multiple and entangled--the irreducible other.  

Extended framework for NF

NF holds space for diverging partial perspectives through the assemblage of nodule worlds rooted in rhizomatic relations, a right to opacity, kin-making, and poetic engagement (in its broadest sense—myth, narrative, language itself). The slow and fragmented worldbuilding at the base of the ocean holds an idea of plural, non-linear storytelling that recognizes the inability of humans to ever know the ocean as a whole. Instead of seeking to know,  they seek to fabulate: to embrace the other, complexity, uncertainties, multiplicities, alliances, and interconnectivities to foster improvisations, resilience, and collective, co-created futures that work with the unknowable. For example, the deep sea and its nodules hold an agency to refuse extraction by remaining unknown. To accept the mystery, opacity, and agency of those that resist being known or fully understood is to move beyond singular notions progress, through scientific knowledge accumulation for evidencing desirable futures (more often than not human-centered ones) and their accompanying  homogenous, often extractive and inhumane, narratives.