Upwelling: The Rise of Ecological Consciousness in the Southern Ocean

In 1904 an eminent Australian geographer, JW Gregory, gave an address in New Zealand on the effects of ocean currents on climate in the Southern Hemisphere. The newly-federated nation of Australia was emerging from a catastrophic eight-year drought, and climatic extremes were fresh in Gregory’s mind when he arrived amongst the green hills of Dunedin to give his address. He argued for the establishment of a United Meteorological Service for Australasia, modelled on the successful Indian service and drawing on contemporary knowledge about the way in which oceans controlled climate in the region. Our ‘crude knowledge’ of the Southern Ocean, he said, demanded that we study it more closely. If ‘our weather be determined by the remote upwelling of water from the deep seas’, then the fledgling science of meteorology was ill-equipped for the task of predicting climate patterns without an understanding the currents and winds that regulated them. The Southern Ocean, an immense, remote ocean in the high southern latitudes, is the world’s youngest ocean. Its waters separate the southern coast and islands of Australia from Antarctica, the two driest and most climatically-extreme continents on Earth. The ocean has deep ecological, political and cultural significance to Australia, yet its history continues to be defined by imperial narratives of heroic maritime exploration and Antarctic exploration. At the time of Professor Gregory’s address, the Southern Ocean had become notorious amongst mariners for its ferocious ‘Roaring Forties’ winds and powerful eastward-flowing currents that encircled the globe. Over the course of the next century, the Southern Ocean would shift dramatically in our consciousness as the new field of oceanography focused scientific attention on its deep ocean currents, revealing them to be a ‘crucial cog’ in the world’s climatic patterns. In this chapter I seek to historicize the Southern Ocean by recasting the traditional narratives of the high southern latitudes within the larger and more complex story of our changing environmental relationships with the ocean. The discovery and exploration of the deep ocean of the high southern latitudes has received little attention from environmental historians. Yet the rise of an ecological consciousness of the Southern Ocean has had profound consequences for our understanding of the Earth’s changing climate, and the impact of the ocean on the lives of those who inhabit the region.