2026/04/19 by Hannah Dickinson · 1 voice
Engineering · Materials Science · #Structural Analysis and Optimization #Calcium Carbonate Crystallization and Inhibition #Advanced Materials and Mechanics
paper · doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104666
This paper develops ‘terraqueous terraforming’ to conceptualise how shrimp and their biomaterials are enrolled in terraforming projects designed to build a more habitable Anthropocene Earth. Critical social science scholarship on terraforming has been overwhelmingly terrestrial in focus. However, this article conceptualises Earthly terraforming as a resolutely terraqueous endeavour which connects land with sea, and human life with marine life, via increasingly complex – yet largely overlooked – entanglements. Drawing upon qualitative data collected via 34 expert interviews and fieldwork in USA and Norway, the paper follows the transformation of shrimp-shells into a biomaterial called chitosan and explores how bio-scientists position chitosan biotechnologies as key tools for building fertile futures on Earth and beyond. Ultimately, the paper reveals that shrimp-shell terraforming operates at a paradoxical crossroads between ocean conservation and extractive capitalism. I argue that processes of terraqueous terraforming intensify fraught relationships between capitalism, land, and sea, as marine organisms become ever-further embedded into circuits of economic exchange, terrestrial ecosystems, and human bodies. Overall, the aqueous becomes the vehicle upon which the transformation of terra rests, and marine life is subordinated to the prevailing terracentric and anthropocentric logics of extractive capital. By examining how ocean ecologies and organisms are implicated in efforts to terraform terra, this paper fills a ‘blue hole’ in terraforming scholarship. Moreover, via ‘terraqueous terraforming’, the article develops a lens to critically interrogate how terraforming with marine biomaterials produces novel articulations of territoriality, thereby reshaping geographical space in ways that unsettle entrenched marine-terrestrial divides.