3. Coldness

Where soft corals offer the surprise of fleshiness athwart the stony iconicity of Coral, cold-water corals offer the surprise of thriving in the chill of the deep. Indeed, the coralation between corals and tropical habitats has dominated the public imaginary and remains the focus of scientific attention. Nearly all global maps of corals, and coral textbooks, focus on tropical corals. The massive Allen Coral Atlas, for example, purports to “map the world’s coral reefs,” yet includes data on tropical corals alone.1 One deep-sea biologist with whom I spoke said that he had never been asked to peer review any tropical coral research, while warm-water coral biologists regularly peer review cold-water coral research.2 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that the humanities have followed suit and focused book-length studies almost exclusively on warm-water, stony (scleractinian), reef-building (hermatypic) corals—their mediations, endangerment, and symbiotic relations.3 What kinds of expectations do cold-water corals break, and what kind of new coralations do they put into perspective?

While many species of cold-water corals exist throughout the world, one widespread species in the Atlantic Ocean is Lophelia pertusa.4 Lophelia is found as shallow as two-hundred feet under the sea in cold waters off the coast of Norway, as well as thousands of feet deep in the Gulf of Mexico and off the continental shelf of West Africa. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a reef as a “ridge or bank of rock, sand, shingle, etc., lying just above or just below the surface of the sea or another body of water, usually in such a way as to pose a hazard to shipping.”5 This definition, linking reefs with surface-level hazards, risks leaving out reefs of Lophelia, since many are too deep to cause shipwrecks. Geographically, one of the largest reefs of Lophelia in the world is Røst Reef, off the coast of Norway. Unlike tropical corals that live close to the surface and bright sunlight, the deep-water environments preferred by cold-water corals are quite dark. Acclimated to an environment without sun, Lophelia is azooxanthellate—existing without symbiotic algae, whose metabolism depends on photosynthesizing sunlight.6 Susan Milius playfully calls Lophelia “corals without boarders,” a homophonic pun on “borders.”7 Due to its lack of zooxanthellae, Lophelia is nearly colorless, taking its name from lophos (tuft of) and helios (sun) to describe the bright white tufted polyps that adorn its branches, feeding by grasping particles of food that float by in the water column. Thus, one key coralation that Lophelia breaks is the way coral implies symbiosis—a relationship that Irus Braverman highlights in her discussion of coralations: “The symbiotic algae-microbes-animal relationship at the core of the corals’ precarious existence reveals that, more than a single unified entity, corals are ‘coralations’—bundles of constantly changing associations that shape and reshape their ways of being in the world and, therefore, the world itself.”8 Because of the way that Lophelia deviates from dominant coralations with symbiosis, sunlight, color, and tropicality, it was described by one textbook as “the coral that breaks all the rules.”9

One implication of deviating from expectations of symbiosis is that Lophelia exists in different relations to environmental mediation. Whereas tropical corals lend themselves to photographic analogies, cold-water corals do not. Consider the way that Ann Elias—reflecting on the early twentieth-century photography of John Williamson and Frank Hurley—describes the way that both corals and photographic practices rely on light:

A thoroughly modern relationship developed between photography and filmmaking, coral reefs, and tropical water, one based in the common ingredient of light and the material quality of transparency. It became apparent that there was a magical correspondence in the way the natural phenomenon of corals and the technological processes of photographs both required light for photochemical reactions. It was a revelation that corals, as well as photographs, needed light to bring them to life and enable development.10

This passage about the importance of light in the lifeworlds of corals and photography resonates with the way that Erin Despard and Michael Gallagher define “photomedia” as a “strategic abstraction that enables us to identify visual relations in which plants and cameras alike are implicated.”11 In the case of tropical corals, symbiotic algae are the “plants” that are photosensitive to light and assist in the growth and development of the coral. Here, the word development slides between biological and photographic valences, enabling an easy relation between developing an image and developing as a lifeform. In addition, Elias goes on to show how, for Williamson and Hurley, the remarkable clarity of Caribbean and Australian seawater served as a kind of technical extension of the camera lens, air-like and providing a slight magnification. Even in artificial situations, like aquarium dioramas, glass and seawater are often seen as continuous extensions of each other that mediate the visual perception of tropical corals.

Stories about Lophelia suggest a different relation to glass, through sound rather than vision. Engineer and marine geologist Martin Hovland provides one striking example in his textbook Deep-Water Coral Reefs: Unique Biodiversity Hot-spots (2008). Hovland recounts a memory from a cruise in July 1982, when—as an employee of the Norwegian company Statoil—he was mapping the seafloor while aboard the survey vessel Master Surveyor for a future oil pipeline from the Åskeladden field in the Barents Sea to Lyngenfjord, Norway. Through the use of sidescan sonar, Hovland noticed an unusual, cone-shaped structure on the seafloor, hundreds of meters below. He directed the crew to use a gravity corer to sample the site:

Soon, the corer hovered at 260 metres depth, right above the top of the unidentified strange cone. Suddenly the corer was dropped until the wire went slack. As it was winched in, excitement rose. Most of us expected just another sticky clay core. But we had luck and a sigh of astonishment went round as several pieces of white coral bits fell tinkling onto the steel deck, it sounded like bits of glass falling [my emphasis].12

Although the first description of the Lophelia sample is visual (“white coral bits fell . . .”), the analogy to glass emphasizes its acoustic properties rather than its visual clarity. Lophelia is sensed through almost musical register, echoing through contact with the steel floor of the petroleum survey ship. This moment of direct mediation builds on the circumstances of distant and technical mediation that led Hovland to the site in the first place: the acoustic technology of sonar, which so effectively transduces sound into visual data for ship navigation and seafloor sensing.13 Whereas visuality is primary in assessing tropical coral reefs, sound—specifically the technical mediation of sonar—is the medium that allows surveyors to see through the opacity of the ocean toward cold-water corals, even thousands of feet deep.

Lophelia recalibrates our iconic expectations of Coral through its geographic distribution in deep and cold waters, its media relations, and—importantly—the new coralation it presents with proximity to infrastructures of petroleum extraction. Like the coast of Norway, the geographies mentioned earlier where Lophelia lives—the Gulf of Mexico and western coast of Africa—are also sites of oil extraction. Although many scientists favor the conservation of deep sea ecologies, the oil industry sometimes volunteers submersible time for scientific research, since it has the expensive vessels that are able to reach deep and remote sites.14 In the context of Norway, there is also a history of cooperation between Norwegian fishermen and oil companies, even though Lophelia reefs are important nurseries for juvenile fish, which if damaged could impact future fisheries.15 One system of nine live reefs—the oldest of which is 8,150 years old—was named after an oil pipeline, and became Haltenpipe Reef Cluster (HRC).16

Some scientists have debated the question: does the geographic correlation between seafloor oil seeps and Lophelia also include an aspect of causation? Do Lophelia reefs metabolically benefit from nearby oil seeps? Hovland—an engineer by training—argues that there is such an element of causation in what he calls a “hydraulic theory,” which holds that Lophelia’s “wellbeing and proliferation [. . .] relies on the assumption that there is a stable, local input of nutrients through the seabed at or near the location where the reefs are found,” and that oil seeps provide these nutrients.17 For Hovland, the geographical proximity of Lophelia to soil seeps should not be overlooked. Studies from the Gulf of Mexico arrive at other conclusions, suggesting that Lophelia may favor the rocky substrates that are the byproduct of gas-eating microbes, the type of rocky perch that may be advantageous for filtering food particles. Oceanographer Eric Cordes writes that the geological formations left by previous seeps could make favorable sites for Lophelia to grow: “These hardgrounds are colonized by deep-sea corals, and could be considered the final successional stage of a seep community.”18 Further, biologist Erin Becker found that, “while coral communities shared several of the same animals found at seep communities, the tissue stable isotope values of the coral and its inhabitants did not reflect a strong signature characteristic of a gas-fueled ecosystem” because “the signatures of the carbonate rock it settled upon were different from Lophelia’s skeleton indicating that it was derived from gas-fueled or other microbial processes.”19 If these studies in the Gulf of Mexico are correct, then coralation is not causation; oil seeps do not cause Lophelia to grow. The one exception might be when Lophelia decides to settle on oil platforms as artificial reefs, as Paulina Bergemark and Dolly Jørgenson have noted.20

We can trace different material coralations between Lophelia and petroleum extraction in the crochet installation “Coral Forest,” commissioned for the 2021 Helsinki Biennial (themed “The Same Sea”) in Finland—a handicraft variation on “soft” coral from the previous chapter, here made entirely of yarn. “Coral Forest” was an iteration of Christine and Margaret Wertheim’s Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef, a collaborative artwork whose scale and multitude of participants often draw comparisons to the AIDS quilt. The reef embodies a form of feminist handicraft that celebrates the similarities in form between ocean organisms and crocheted shapes, which both embody the mathematics of non-Euclidian geometry inspired by mathematician Daina Taimiņa. As anthropologist Sophia Roosth notes, “Reef crafters, while following her technique, use her algorithm as a starting point from which to digress and upon which to embellish in order to yield what they consider to be ‘biological’ forms.”21 While the initial reefs were crocheted by the Wertheim sisters, subsequent projects (“satellite reefs”) have involved thousands of participants from around the world. More than three thousand Finnish people participated in contributing pieces to the Helsinki reef. Environmental humanities scholar Heather Davis describes this collaborative process as one in which “each person becomes part of a wider whole, analogous to an individual coral ‘polyp,’ engaging with the slow process of building a collective form.”22 Here, “community and individual agency are activated, mirroring the formation of living reefs that also grow in relation to their local conditions.”23

To see a brightly colored coral reef sculpture in a Scandinavian environment might seem to exemplify the dominant coralation between coral and the rainbow tropics. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to commission a reef emulating cold-water corals, like Lophelia pertusa (though still some distance from the Baltic Sea), that are geographically closer to Finland than their warm-water cousins? Why emulate the rainbow colors of the tropics instead? While the Helsinki Coral Forest may not represent cold-water corals, it doesn’t exactly represent warm-water corals either. The corals are much more fantastic—coral-like without always representing specific species—with crocheters positioned to evolve and fabricate new forms. Reflecting on some of the earlier Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reefs, Roosth examines the conditions under which the Reef’s makers “describe their work in explicitly biological terms [. . .] to claim that they are fabricating new taxa, new genera, new species [. . .].”24 We might see the Helsinki Coral Forest as precisely such a fabrication rather than a representation of corals, uncoralated from the species that make their home in the cold waters of the North Atlantic.

If we think of fabrication in terms of material, it is also significant that the Helsinki Reef was made from repurposed petroleum-based plastics. The corals take on fantastical colors and forms, including highlights of “printer’s ink” and “bluish-violet,” from upcycled strips of plastic leftover from toilet paper packaging, among other materials.25 In several corals, bands of white and purple spiral across crenellated forms, along with an anemone-like creature with lime-green zip ties for tentacles. The shine on the reef belies its plastic form, across so many crevices created by the crochet stiches. The textured forms of donated and repurposed plastic strips draw attention to what many purchased yarns made of acrylic or polyester hide: the fact that these common yarns are also made of petroleum-based plastics (constituting, for example, the majority of the yarns carried by the local Michael’s craft store where I live in the United States). To crochet a reef out of plastic strips formally echoes the coralation of Lophelia reefs and petroleum infrastructures.

Climate change amplifies other coralations with petroleum. During the unusually hot and rainy summer of 2021, the plastic reef exhibit took a turn for the worse: “On Vallisaari, the island where the artworks were displayed, the bunkers became infested with mold. Video screens dripped with slime, projectors burnt out; but these were solvable problems. For the corals, a more permanent tragedy ensued. Blobs of mold blossomed on the pedestals and on the understructures holding up the works.”26 Reflecting on the way that the rise in summer temperatures was part of the ongoing rise in global temperatures fueled by increased atmospheric carbon from global oil extraction, the Wertheims write: “Even plastic sea creatures can’t stand the onslaught of humanity’s petrochemical ensorcellment.”27 Although the crochet reefs had been intended to be shown next in Germany, the presence of mold meant that international shipping could not happen. The Wertheims wryly comment that if the corals had been made by a more famous artist (Anish Kapoor or Jeff Koons, for example) a way forward could have been found; the decision to throw away the artworks likely reflected a broader devaluation of multiartist craftworks. Parallel to how oceanic sea creatures face threats from ocean warming and plastic pollution, the plastic sea creatures were made disposable by the growth of molds. The coralation between Scandinavian reefs and petromodernity remains coincident in both living corals and abstract forms, Lophelia pertusa and hyperbolic crochet, each under threat of unraveling.

Notes

1. Allen Coral Atlas, https://allencoralatlas.org/.
2. Eric Cordes, personal email, 2022.
3. With the exception of Bergemark and Jørgenson “Lophelia pertusa Conservation in the North Sea Using Obsolete Offshore Structures as Artificial Reefs” (2014) and parts of coral biologist Malcolm Shick’s excellent visual history Where the Corals Lie (2018), JSTOR did not turn up any other results.
4. Lophelia pertusa was recently renamed Desmophyllum pertusum in the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS), in response to molecular studies by Addamo et al. in 2012 and 2016. However, I have chosen to retain the Linnean name, which is still widely recognized and was used in primary source material I quote from circa 2019. See: https://www.marinespecies.org/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&id=135161.
5. “Reef,” Oxford English Dictionary
6. On tropical corals and metabolism, see Cameron McKean, http://somatosphere.net/2020/life-coral-body-great-barrier-reef.html/.
7. Susan Milius, “Corals without Boarders,” Science News 166, no. 6 (2004): 88–89.
8. Braverman, Coral Whisperers, 1.
9. Roberts 1997, quoted in Martin Hovland, Deep-Water Coral Reefs: Unique Biodiveresity Hot-Spots (New York: Springer, 2008), ix.
10. Elias, Coral Empire, 20.
11. Erin Despard and Michael Gallagher, “The Media Ecologies of Plant Invasion,” Environmental Humanities 10, no. 2 (2018): 373.
12. Hovland, Deep-Water Coral Reefs, 16.
13. On “transductive ethnography” see Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), 230.
14. For example, Cindy Van Dover, “Tighten Regulations on Deep-Sea Mining,” Nature 470, 31–33 (2011), https://doi.org/10.1038/470031a.
15. Elena Parmiggiani and Eric Monteiro, “Digitized Coral Reefs,” in digitalSTS: A Field Guide for Science and Technology Studies, ed. Vertesi et al. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).
16. Hovland, Deep-Water Coral Reefs, 46.
17. Hovland and Risk, “Do Norwegian Deep-Water Coral Reefs Rely on Seeping Fluids?” Marine Geology 198 (2003): 84.
18. Eric Cordes, “The Ecology of Gulf of Mexico Deep-Sea Hardground Communities,” https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/06mexico/background/hardgrounds/hardgrounds.html.
19. Kevin Zelnio, “Deep Sea Corals and Methane Seeps,” https://deepseanews.com/2009/07/seeps-lophelia-carbonate-2/.
20. Bergemark and Jørgenson “Lophelia pertusa Conservation in the North Sea Using Obsolete Offshore Structures as Artificial Reefs.”
21. Sophia Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley: Living Tissues, Wooly Textiles, Theoretical Biologies,” differences 25, no. 5 (2012): 15.
22. Heather Davis, “Feeling Crochet, Feeling Coral,” in Margaret and Christine Wertheim, Value and Transformation of Corals: Catalogue for the Exhibition at Museum Frieder Burda 2022 (Cologne, Germany: Weinand Verlag, 2022), 31.
23. Davis, 31.
24. Roosth, “Evolutionary Yarns in Seahorse Valley,” 11.
25. Margaret Wertheim and Christine Wertheim, Value and Transformation of Corals, 99.
26. Wertheim and Wertheim, 101.
27. Wertheim and Wertheim, 101.

4. Grafting