On Leaving the Archive and Wading Into the Sea: Ice and jellyfish at the end of the world

Artwork by Anja Segmueller

I am eleven. I am poised: tucked into the little green alcove in the top corner of my grandparents’ garden, sinking into the patch of soil where the herbs grow. My knees are muddy, my shoes are ruined. Somewhere by the house, my cousin counts backwards from one hundred. I wait, breath baited, while he trims back time. Shuffling further into the recess of the back wall, my hand clutches soil for purchase, and beneath my fingers crumble the remnants of the last year; the dried leaves, the rosemary roots, the insect shells, the mingled ash of autumn bonfires. Sinking my hand deeper, distracted, I may find the lingering remains of last winter’s sage, or, deeper still, the skeletal husks of the lavender I planted with my mum when I was six. On this familiar patch of ground I have buried bulbs and dropped lost toys, grazed off skin and left peach pips; my Grandfather has cultivated rhubarb here every autumn of his life, and has lost at least two pairs of glasses; my mum buried a beloved pet here when she was twelve. Before my family, this patch belonged to a man who kept pigs, and before that formed part of a Victorian dumping ground. It is still throwing up shards of china, glass, and clay pipe. This is dense earth. The soil brims with lives, deaths, remembrances. Arrow-heads and bottle caps, acorns and bacteria. Millennia before I crouched in this corner, this ground was under a vast sea; whorls of fossilized coral still work their way up into watery sunshine. 

When we think of archive, we think of shelves, blinds, and reference numbers: of tightly-packed, institutional sterility. This sense of an archive is predicated on airless interiors and solid walls braced tight against sunlight, moisture, and scrabbling hands. But is this patch of ground where I am crouched not an accumulation of traces: a record of living, and breathing, and breaking, and dying? Is this not an archive?

The answer matters. To identify an archive is to recognise a site of memory outside of the self. It is to make a decision about where we locate the traces of the past, and to determine what we count as a valuable, viable record of passing time. As we look to a future hollowed by climate crisis, this question of locating the past becomes all the more pressing. In an age of thawings and sublimations, endings and extinctions, memory itself is a matter of ethical urgency. We must expand our understanding of archive beyond ordered shelves and lamplit rooms, turning our attention to remembrance held in earth and ice and silt and sea, outside of institutional bounds and beyond, even, human legibility. We have to glimpse the archivalities embedded in the very environments through which we move, even if these glimpses are partial, unfamiliar, and ringing with the more-than-human.

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We do not call archive fire when someone starts their car, and yet, petroleum, the driving force of modernity, is made up of millions of fossilized creatures. For many, petroleum is a faceless substance. Extracted far off-shore and pumped vast, invisible distances underground, it can easily be rendered anonymous: a strange lacuna, devoid of context, inflected not by the densities of a million of tiny deaths, but by the smooth, numb lucency of the convenient now. Is it exactly a disavowal of this archivality, then, that is partly at fault for the current crisis? 

If petroleum is an archive, though, it is a disorientingly illegible one. The dizzying scales of ancient sedimentation and distant extraction feel a far cry from the paper packet and the ordered catalogue of the institutional archive. But this vertigo is exactly what the traditional archive occludes. To exist at this point of crisis is exactly to exist in the midst of a vast illegibility; to be suspended within a churning infinitude of time and space, stranded in a glacial blankness that stretches in every direction, and yet sinks and cleaves beneath your very feet. It is to have a sense of something, always, in the corner of your eye; to feel yourself suspended in debris; to lose sight of edges that shift and submerge and will not hold. Timothy Morton terms this the ‘hyperobject’: climate crisis, he argues, is a phenomenon so enormous in scale that we are unable to conceptualize it in its entirety. Instead, we grasp at fragments and glimpse vague peripheries. The hushed, sensible, rooms of traditional archive are not sufficient for a world that is fraying at the edges: we need a notion of archive that grazes the edges of that vastness, that absurdity, that more-than-human. 

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In a sense, the very notion of the Anthropocene is predicated on such a brush with archival vastness. To say that we are living in the Anthropocene is to perform a feat of imagination that grapples with distance and scale. It is to cast the mind forward to a future beyond the human, pull from its ground a rock sample, and find it teeming with the record of human influence; a geological layer dense with chicken bones, shards of glass, plastics: ticking with radioactivity. 

To call for an expanded notion of archive, then, is also to call for attention to the lost, the abject and the wasted in our present. It is to frame that present as something which will one day become past (somewhere, in a distant epoch, a scrabbling hand encounters plastic and bone). In doing so, we may find more imaginatively generous ways of contending with the rapidly shifting now, and orienting ourselves towards the stricken, hollow space of the future.

This instability, this fraught suspension between pastness and futurity (the same blankness that lies between death and extinction) is what makes a more-than-human attention to archive so disorienting, and so important. Within vast expanses of ice, millions of years of dust, pollen, ash, and tiny air particles hang suspended in a glacial archive. Some 40,000 segments of this ice have been extracted, housed in an ice core ‘library’ at the University of Copenhagen. But while the Niels Bohr Institute, in a bid for legibility, preserves its cylinders of arctic ice in a vast artificial chill, the oceans outside continue to warm, and the seas are filled with the sounds of ice-bergs ‘weeping’, melting off the coast of Antarctica: singing their own elegies. We are one of the last generations to witness major glaciation. By the end of the century, it will be gone. 

Amidst this glacial amnesia, ice dissolves into water, subsumed in the resounding intricacy we call the sea. Dust, pollen, and ash are emptied into the marine static of plastic and paint scrapings, whale bones and bleached coral, zooplankton and millennia of shifting, grinding silt. This is climate crisis’ slip into illegibility. 

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And so here we are, drifting out through gnomic depths, with the crush of those dense archival entanglements closing far above us, and a headache blooming, purpling somewhere between the skull and the face. Here, at the end of it all, disoriented in the dark, we might cast a searching limb into that murky press, and find ourselves answered by a tendril: entangled, suddenly, in something ancient, primordial, and yet also, now, a baleful harbinger of the future. 

In these murky depths, vast blooms of jellyfish flourish. The beneficiaries of warmer seas, over-fishing and nutrient contamination, they map, in billowing cartography, a shifting world in crisis. At every point, jellyfish are intertwined with the human: flowing in great columns in the wake of container ships, they trace shimmering threads along the criss-crossing routes of expanding human trade; they drift into the filtration systems of nuclear power plants, disrupting, as they pass, the nodal points in vast webs of modern energy; they wash up on man-made beaches, attesting, with their very bodies, the changing conditions of adjacent seas. This unprecedented swilling mass is a reverberation of human action, but jellyfish operate on a scale of space and time that far outstrips that human. What we glimpse is fragmentary; bobbing shapes from the deck of a ship; a warning light on a power-station panel; a trail of rubbery debris on the sand. The human encounters only the peripheries of this vast, living, dying, drifting testament. This, like arctic ice, is archive in flux: shifting and shimmering beyond the scale of what is fully legible at any one moment. And yet, the unseen peripheries and the nebulous centres of the jellyfish bloom point beyond the human to a vast and ancient cyclicality. As the vertigo of climate crisis distorts any sense of spatial or temporal orientation, time seems to fold back on itself: waters billowing with jellyfish revert the oceans to a state much closer to the way they looked in the Cambrian period. Far outstripping the human, perhaps this is a much deeper form of remembering. 

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Archive needs to be deep. It needs to be far-reaching, and vast, and liquid, and shifting. It must be open to the contingencies of indeterminate futures, and it must orient towards the new forms of being on the other side of that blankness. We need archive to be expansive, even as it accepts, as its very condition, its own incompleteness. Amnesia is always already at the core of climate crisis. But by expanding the scale on which we consider archive, we can expand the temporal and spatial horizons on which memory is possible, and locate that memory beyond the human.

Somewhere, across depth and expanse, this corner of garden is shifting beneath fathoms of a deep new sea. Languid currents unsettle fragments of root; pluck up, from the depths, a pair of old glass frames. But for now, my cousin calls out the end of his count. And I, planting my hands and tucking into myself, scrunch my eyes against the inevitable, finding some solace in an adopted dark. For now, I wait to be found. As footsteps approach, I clutch for comfort, and maybe for luck, all that I have; a handful of earth.

By Anna Studsgarth and Joe Emmens for CRoB Digital, edited by Jack Heath

Artwork by Anja Segmueller