Specimen cases at the Museum of Practical Geology, London, in 1851. Engraving by John Clerk of Eldin (1787), from James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth (1795). Some state geologic surveys house their rocks in “museums,” while others maintain “sample libraries,” “reference collections,” or “repositories.” Differences in terminology reflect different conventions of thought and practice. Species collections, core samples, and medieval manuscripts can all help researchers understand the changing climate, but they are subject to widely varying protocols of collection, preservation, and access. Yet those data and documents are not structured uniformly. 1 The geologic field itself, and strategically selected samples of it, become archival documents, in the same way that, for Suzanne Briet, “the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy, and the animals that are catalogued and shown in a zoo” are documents. To survey the past 150 years or so, climate researchers can use instrument readings from ships and weather stations, but to understand global patterns across deep time, they must turn to proxies: ice cores, boreholes, lake and ocean sediments, pollens, tree rings, corals, stalactites and stalagmites, and other natural features that index climatic events.
And the climate archive (like most archives) gets wilder and dirtier the deeper you go. Weather data flow through neural nets and populate massive data centers, but they also reside in refrigerators and polystyrene tubes. Ice cores, boreholes, sediments, pollens, tree rings, corals, and other samples of the geologic field become documents. The climate archive gets wilder and dirtier the deeper you go.
How often do you think about the mediated space between the weather forecast and the reality of climate change? Behind the day-glo radar maps and adorably abstract sun and cloud icons are vast amounts of data feeding atmospheric models that inform not only how we dress for the day, but how we prepare for droughts and superstorms. Thin section of an ice core from Antarctica.
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