Under the Ice: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December 1954

 

The British Greenland Expedition has been over since the summer, and since I'm not going to bother going through the archives, I'm just going to say that it's been a few months since the announcement of the existence of the Lomonsov Ridge, an "unusual ridge of the continental crust in the Arctic Ocean" that emerges as the New Siberian Islands in the Eastern Hemisphere, and maybe Ellesmere Island or Greenland in the Western. 

There might be some people on the New Siberians mining ivory. Otherwise, God just made them to amuse himself. Which is also something you can say about the Lomonsov Ridge. It made a desperate play for relevance in the Cold War because the Americans and Soviets were playing at keeping the drift patterns in the Arctic Basin secret so that they couldn't find each others' Apocalypse Ice Station Zero airbase that no-one built because, come on, seriously. Though on the other hand "come on, seriously" was a scarce commodity in the Cold War and the Reverse Bungie Cord air pickup system, which is also relevant this month on account of it trying to start WWIII by getting two CIA operatives put on trial in for espionage in Beijing, appears in one story about those ice floe bases.

But that's not the story holding everything together this week. That would be the story about the Oklahoma oil field services company doing boat drills off New York. 

Seismograph Service Company still exists, per its single sentence blurb at Bloomberg News, providing "computer data processing of raw seismic field data into seismograms for the petroleum industries." They also work with archaeological seismic surveys and, if the Digital Antiquity website is accurate, have moved head office from Tulsa to Denver (it's hard to argue with that!) at some point in the last seventy years. You can also vaguely see how their fiddling around in boats, specifically with their "LORAC" Long Range Accuracy sets for giving boats extremely accurate grid locations with respect to fixed radio beacons led to their current IT work. Drilling for oil and gas requires extreme accuracy on a featureless seascape, and the further you are away from visible onshore landmarks, the harder it is. Clearly people are getting better and better  at it, because North Sea oil is such a gigantic achievement in the field of, among other things, pinpoint navigation. Not only were the oil fields well off shore, but the industry really got underway when a field was discovered in Norwegian waters, and, well, then you have to be able to show that you are in Norwegian waters. 

You probably wouldn't have to get super poetical to dig up an irony in the convergence of offshore oil and gas exploitation with the ongoing exploration of the icefree region of Peary Land at the northern tip of Greenland (where the Lomonsov Ridge may or may not land, the question being apparently important to possible future oil and mineral exploration in the Arctic Basin) and the Paleo-Eskimo Independence I and II cultures just discovered at Deltaterrassserne in 1948 by Eigil Knuth. 

Okay, okay, I'll give it a go: One the one hand you have a precocious achievement of Paleolithic technology that ultimately proved unable to cope with the exigencies of climate. On the other you have an achievement of modern technology which is fucking up the climate. Trying to visualise how Independence I people lived suggests that their lives were pretty sucky, and guess what about today? Don't worry, any day now someone is going to notice what Adam Smith, never mind Henry George, had to say about the relationship between land rents and land use! Any day now . . .  

So what the Soviet floating stations were doing was bathymetry through the ice pack that they still had in those long ago days, and in which conditions being able to map underwater features was a remarkable achievement. Meanwhile, the British North Greenland Expedition was doing many things, but one of those things was gravimetric survey.  Gravimetry is when you set up highly accurate accerelometers and measure variations in the Earth's gravity, kind of like that first year physics pendulum experiment where you measure the value of g by timing the oscillation, only instead of not being able to get 981 cm/s squared because it's 4:50 and you've got to catch a bus, it's because the local value of acceleration due to gravity does vary, albeit fairly minutely, and you can map underground features using a surface map of local variations in g. 

At this point the geologists like to go all jargony, but the upshot is that if you find a geological feature that was probably a contiguous region in antiquity and which is spread all over the place in modern times, you're either going to be tempted by the heresy that is "continental drift," or you're going to have to come up with an ad hoc explanation based on the much more logical mechanism of Earth-contraction theory, and the more weird underground stuff you find, the more baroque your theory-that-excludes-continental-drift is going to get, until, as Thomas Kuhn should probably have said, but didn't, it ba-reaks!

They were also doing geomagnetics, which is looking at the orientation of magenitised particles in the ground, obviously of some interest to people trying to fly over the Pole, but, for geologists, but also because of the development of MAD to look for submarines during WWII, and mineral deposits since. Synchronic variation in B is to be expected, because the North Magnetic Pole moves, but "polar wander," but the maps get weirder when B is found to point in different directions in adjacent beds of evidently contemporary status. The big test here is "zebra striping" due to seafloor spreading, but it is much more obvious in northern latitudes because the magnetic pole is closer and more i nfluential.  How strange this map of fossilised B will look will depend on the amount of raw data, at least to opponents of continental drift. And when the magnitude of the variations and the number found is great enough, and paradigms shift.  

With regards to the Lomonsov Ridge, in 1947, Maurice Ewing of Woods Hole established the existence of a mid-ocean ridge in the Atlantic, suggesting that new crust was being formed at the centre of ocean basins. As late as 1960 this was still being explained in terms of the Earth's size changing, now with the Earth growing somehow, but the more mid-ocean ridges, the more plausible a plate tectonics explanation becomes. The Arctic Ocean has the additional advantage of being an experimental field, in that you can theorise the existence of a mid-basin ridge and then go find it. Hurray for the Scientific Method! Which, of course, Kuhn and his 1962 "paradigm shift" are an alternative to, but whatever. 

It is interesting that Kuhn, like many historians of science and technology, was a failed physicist (Erik puts up hand sheepishly), and worked back from the turn-of-the-century rupture between Classical and Modern Physics to the highly stylised story (don't get me started!) of the geocentric/heliocentric rupture, while the most dramatic story of paradigm shift in real time was then playing out in one of the "stamp collecting" sciences. So the existence of a region --the Polar-- in which geologists could propose the existence of phenomena as dramatic as mid-ocean ridges and then go and find them, is perhaps not a small thing. 

 I'm no geologist, but I was brought up in the age when plate tectonics was still relevant enough that it was discussed in terms of, "Oh, hey, how about that plate tectonics." In fact, I gather that geologists date the official moment of "paradigm shift" to 1965. Wow. And, of course, once the paradigm was settled, petroleum geologists could go out and use it to find new oilfields, which is how we get our modern utopia. 

Next up, British aviation and the Dutch disease! Okay, okay, not so much "next up" as "always up." Whatever.