The term “ocean frontiers” has increasingly been used in the past two decades to depict human actions in oceans. It qualifies transitional spaces where one can observe a rush of new activities, actors and institutional schemes that signal incorporation of these spaces into the scope of a particular society. In other words, frontiers are “area[s] of diminishing authority within which the ‘inside’ gradually becomes an ‘outside’” (Steinberg 2018). A frontier movement in oceans is neither new nor a-cultural. It emerged in the mid-20th century with the development of industrial long-distance fisheries, drilling of seabed resources, and the offshore extension of coastal states’ sovereign rights (as formalized by the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea). In recent years, this movement has however accelerated and taken on novel forms. First, it concerns a diversifying set of maritime activities, especially spatially fixed ones such as the exploration of deep-sea resources, deployment of submarine cables or creation of Marine Protected Areas, or MPAs (Jouffray et al. 2020). This diversified intensification of ocean frontiers transpires in media discourse and in these frontiers’ increased documentation within marine social sciences (Havice and Zalik 2018). Second, ocean frontiers are rising at a moment of trespassed planetary boundaries and calls to limit the exploitation of the Earth (Rockström et al. 2009). They therefore unravel in a tension between the progress of humans into societal margins, and the need for human limits. Why do oceans today so strongly concentrate this paradoxical narrative?
To address this question, my research has investigated an empirical window onto the ocean frontier movement. I argue that two beliefs drive frontiers in general. First, they rely on views of certain spaces as empty and thus available – “vacant, ungoverned, natural or inhabited” (Rasmussen and Lund 2018), which they are not. Second, this socially constructed emptiness in frontiers allows us to imagine unlimited human expansion. Together, these beliefs form an ideology that has driven frontiers across colonial settings and the advance of capitalism into non-capitalist domains (Fache, Le Meur, and Rodary 2021) in problematic and often violent ways. As frontiers are constructed, they, in a sense, push towards ever deeper and distant oceans, thus the need for critical assessment, especially as forms of social inequity and anthropogenic impacts on ocean environments have not ceased to increase. To do so, I have empirically studied an offshore space used and described as part of different ocean frontiers from the late 1930s to this day.
A first observation is that the offshore space in question is toponomically elusive: ‘dome.’ This area off Central America, the Costa Rica Dome, Guardian Bank, green waters, cold fronts, Thermal Dome… its naming is diverse and somewhat unsettled. The term “Dome” frequently associated to Costa Rica to qualify it is misleading in various ways. The phenomenon that it characterizes is not visible to the human eye, but captured by oceanographers’ drawing of the ocean’s thermal layers through depth.
But, where is it? It corresponds, in the Pacific Ocean off Central America, to the rise of the “thermocline,” a specific, geophysically-described boundary zone in the water column where the temperature decreases abruptly with depth. What this means is that in the area where the “Dome” occurs, the thermocline is closer to the surface – and with it, colder, nutrient-rich waters emerge. It is also the case of a handful of other geographically unique offshore areas produced by specific winds and currents (i.e. Guinea Dome, Angola Dome, Mindanao Dome). “Upwelled” waters in these areas are biologically productive, inducing high concentrations of phytoplankton and zooplankton in spatio-temporal dynamic ways that serve as a habitat for different species. Associated to Costa Rica at the time of its oceanographic discovery, this mobile and labile feature evolves offshore, generally a few hundred kilometers away from the Pacific coasts of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. It may extend up to several hundred kilometers in diameter. While its location has corresponded to international waters in the mid-20th century, evolution of international Law of the Sea now positions the Dome between international waters and Exclusive Economic Zones of Central American countries that reach 200 nautical miles (370 kilometers) from the coasts. The “dome” is, in many ways mobile, highlighting the difficulty of mastering the ocean as a frontier space.
Clik here to view.
Clik here to view.
A historical retrospective of the Dome’s uses and knowledges reveals that it first came into focus as part of fisheries frontiers. In particular, the deployment of industrial tuna fleets in the Pacific off Central America, mainly from Japan and the USA starting in the 1930s, led to observations of the offshore recurrence of colder, biologically productive waters. This motivated a first phase of oceanographic research hosted in Californian institutions to describe this underwater phenomenon with the hope of serving the development of the US naval fleet. In addition to these longstanding tuna fisheries, other extractive activities extended in the area in the late 20th century, also from countries outside of the region. These include work of mainly Taiwanese vessels targeting sharks, as well as more recently, Chinese vessels jigging squids.
Over the past decade, the Dome has garnered attention as part of another frontier movement. Organizations working in the field of global marine biodiversity conservation (Campbell, Gruby, and Gray 2024) are increasingly calling for area-based environmental protection in the High Seas, especially in the form of “Marine Protected Areas.” While intergovernmental institutions and law provide for very few of these protection schemes, international negotiations have led to a recent treaty expected to facilitate their development (the so-called “Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction” – BBNJ – Agreement). In this setting, certain environmental NGOs, under the leadership of the MarViva Foundation based in Costa Rica, have been working on the Dome. Today, this has not led to forms of governance for it, but consists in “epistemic advocacy” actions.
What stands out from the Dome’s social construction as parts of these ocean frontiers is its persistently elusive nature as an offshore space. This is visible from the strategies that different types of human actors – mainly in the fields of oceanographic sciences, various offshore fisheries, and nature conservation – have deployed to relate to it. Over 60 years of oceanography have refined its scientific understanding in increasingly remote and technically mediated ways. Best known from afar, it has remained widely out of reach for oceanographers from the Global South despite their relative proximity to it. Its remoteness, geophysical variability, and the mobility of species using it have led to spatialize it as a “fuzzy” geographical object, without sharp boundaries by which to locate it. Scientists struggle to precisely account for its dynamic ecological links with species. Although the concern of fisheries initially motivated the interest towards this feature, here as well, this space does not show clear patterns of appropriation. Fleets from distant-water fishing nations recurrently came close to its occurrence, but these encounters did not prove strategic on a stable basis. Rather, fishers seem to relate to it as a “fluid” space (Peters 2020), using it according to dynamic configurations that serve them in labile ways. In addition, the Dome over time appears as an unseized promise for the growth of a national fisheries wealth in Costa Rica. Lastly, while conservation actors and NGOs are the most adamant about this space’s governance, especially due to their concern in recent years with MPAs as a governance scheme, these efforts today shape a “geography of promise” whose outcomes are unclear. This promise-making is rhetorical, but its effects may be performative. Producing particular spatial imaginaries, these efforts wrestle to socialize the Dome, but it serves to advance a wider political agenda on area-based protection in the High Seas.
Despite the attempts of frontier-making to appropriate the Dome, what we are seeing today is an extension of the historical trajectory of engagement with this space – it’s most stable feature is not the thing itself, but how widely inaccessible it is, while also seldom socialized. In other words, rather than seeing it from what I would call a “frontier mindset,” that is, as waiting for appropriation, we might suggest that the dome and other spaces like it are a limit to the human world and other forms of relating to oceans. As such, this unique, fluid, ever-flowing offshore space might be instructively read as a counter-narrative to dominant trends of unlimited expansion, both on capitalist terms, as well as on techno-scientific ones. It poses daunting yet essential questions on how to protect the geographical margins of the ecumene, those that we do not inhabit but on which our dwelling depends.
Funding:
This research was funded by the French Development Agency (AFD), with co-funding from the French National Association of Research and Technology and the French government. It was hosted by the AFD’s research department, the UMR SENS and University Paul Valéry Montpellier III. The resulting monograph is available here.
Keywords:
ocean frontier, Costa Rica Dome, offshore space, high seas, biodiversity conservation, offshore fisheries, oceanographic sciences, Pacific Ocean, Costa Rica, Central America.
References
Campbell, Lisa M., Rebecca Gruby, and Noella J. Gray. 2024. “Configuring the field of global marine biodiversity conservation.” Frontiers in Marine Science 10: 1–16.
Fache, Elodie, Pierre-Yves Le Meur, and Estienne Rodary. 2021. “Introduction: The New Scramble for the Pacific: A Frontier Approach.” Pacific Affairs 94 (1): 57–75.
Fiedler, Paul. 2002. “The annual cycle and biological effects of the Costa Rica Dome.” Deep-Sea Research I 49 (2): 321–338.
Jouffray, Jean-Baptiste, Robert Blasiak, Albert Norstrom, Henrik Osterblom, and Magnus Nystrom. 2020. “The Blue Acceleration: The Trajectory of Human Expansion into the Ocean.” One Earth 2 (1): 43–54.
Havice, Elizabeth, and Anna Zalik. 2018. “Ocean Frontiers: Epistemologies, Jurisdictions, Commodifications.” International Social Science Journal 68 (229–230): 219–235.
Peters, Kimberley. 2020. “The Territories of Governance: Unpacking the Ontologies and Geophilosophies of Fixed to Flexible Ocean Management, and Beyond.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 375 (1814): 1–10.
Rasmussen, Mattias Borg, and Christian Lund. 2018. “Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces: The territorialization of resource control.” World Development 101: 388–399.
Rockström, Johan, Will Steffen, Kevin Noone, Åsa Persson, Eric Lambin, Timothy Lenton, Marten Scheffer, et al. 2009. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity.” Ecology and Society 14 (2): 472-475.
Steinberg, Philip E. 2018. “The Ocean as Frontier.” International Social Science Journal 68 (229–230): 237–240.
Cover Image: Cover Linocut “The Dome” by Romain Pennec digitalized by Jeremy Wanner
Author: Nadège Legroux, PhD – Montpellier Environmental Humanities Lab (UMR SENS)