Oceanic cartographies: Poetics in a saturated medium

What the paper says

This article contends that the ocean—so often romanticized as boundless, fluid, and open—is in fact saturated: chemically, logistically, and affectively. Drawing from recent work in environmental humanities, blue humanities, and extinction studies, it reframes saturation not merely as a scientific metric but as a political and ecological condition. The sea emerges here as a site where residues of capital accumulate and circulate: a sensorium of extraction, corrosion, and multiagent pressure. The analysis unfolds in three movements. First, it revisits maps of ocean acidification—specifically aragonite saturation states—to interrogate their visual logics, affective registers, and epistemic assumptions. In dialogue with Helmreich’s chromatic critique and Alaimo’s materialist poetics, it asks what these representations disclose and occlude about marine dissolution. Second, it examines maritime traffic as a surface of capitalist saturation, where logistical networks redraw the ocean as a grid of extraction and relentless circulation. Here, the sea becomes infrastructural: crisscrossed by tankers, flagged by financial abstraction. Third, it traces the spectral presence of ghost nets—plastic apparitions that persist beyond utility—whose entanglements dramatize the slow violence of ecological breakdown as media. Rather than presenting saturation as a static endpoint, the article proposes it as a method of reading: a way to sense capitalism’s corrosive density across ecological, aesthetic, and cartographic forms. In place of redemption or narrative closure, it invites attention to viscosity, opacity, and the uneasy durations of the ecological emergency. The ocean, in this frame, is not emptied but overfull—haunted by accumulation, shaped by refusal, and vital as a critical medium for rethinking ecology in the era of loss and extinction due to capitalist praxes.