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THE traditional archive stops and isolates history; it periodizes and indexes the past. It sits in a building, often with limited access. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, who famously wrote that archives are in “house arrest,” also wrote that “[the archive] keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion.” This “unnatural fashion” of demarcating history is even more untenable in the Anthropocene, when we are constantly aware that we are already living in the aftermath of the industrial revolution and the atom bomb, among other events, and when we are increasingly realizing that it is impossible to stop or cordon off history. In this way, the concept of the Anthropocene can be useful: it heralds the end of an imagined distinction between human and natural history and emphasizes the ways the planet’s past extends into its present and future. And yet, many accounts of the Anthropocene approach history through a geologic framework that limits this usefulness by mimicking aspects of the conventional archive. With its focus on geological strata and fossil excavations, the Anthropocene paradigm can impart the idea that the planet records history in bounded layers of stable matter, from which past artifacts might be unearthed relatively intact.

The ocean, on the other hand, raises new possibilities for reading human-environmental history. However, the idea that it might be pertinent to the politics of historical knowledge is often unexamined. For much of Western history, the ocean was largely treated as a great void by scientists, industries, and governments alike; in the words of literary critic Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “the rise of modernity was reflected in its marine waste”; historian Joseph Hamblin explains that as late as the 1950s even oceanographers asserted that the ocean “could be considered a giant sewer.” Waste–whether sewage, radioactive byproducts, or corporeal remains–could be dumped into the sea, never to be seen again. The ocean could wash humanity clean, buffering us from the effects of carbon combustion, pollution, and nuclear experimentation.

But this view of the ocean has been revealed to be a dangerous illusion. Extreme storms, rising seas, and the mass death of carbon-sequestering ocean plankton forcefully show us the ocean’s key role in regulating the climate and fostering life on Earth. We are also reminded that marine biological and geological resources remain vital to the global economy and that 90 percent of modern shipping still occurs via marine routes. These are simply the most prominent examples of how the ocean has been re-centered in environmental, political, and economic imaginaries, a development that historian of science Naomi Oreskes calls “one of the most important cultural and scientific shifts of the 20th century.” The ocean reminds us constantly that what is put into its waters may sink for a time, but will circulate and emerge later–and not always predictably.

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