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Microplastics in Arctic Sea Ice: A Petromodern Archive Fever
Summary
This cultural studies essay examines microplastics found in Arctic sea ice as a form of archive — recording human pollution and reducing the ecological agency of the ice itself. The paper applies philosophical frameworks to plastic contamination, arguing that microplastics in sea ice represent both a record of human impact and an erasure of natural ecological processes.
Following the spread of plastic waste into every corner of the globe, they view its “storage” in sea ice and animal bodies as an alternate archive, an obfuscation of ecological agency and the diminution of our own bodily autonomy. Approaching this through a Derridean “hauntological” frame, the authors posit that the presence and persistence of microplastics in sea ice are a manifestation of a global agential community of commodities archiving itself. This palimpsest of ecological histories (in terms of how traces of petrocultures write over one another) subsists as traces and samples of new industrial, cultural, and ecological realities. Considering the personal and affective impacts of this petromodern archival landscape, Mitchell and Waterhouse frame the ensuing melancholia as an Anthropocene equivalent of the Derridean archive fever: a sickness unto the death of ecosystems.
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