Description
At the height of the Cold War, the International Geophysical Year (IGY) represented an impressive international cooperative effort with more than 60,000 scientists from 67 states working together towards understanding the globe in its entirety. In particular, data collection efforts focused on sciences that required comprehensive data gathering networks such as oceanography, meteorology, geomagnetism, and space exploration and emphasized the importance of simultaneous coordination to fill the ‘blank’ spaces in our knowledge of earth systems. During planning meetings ahead of the IGY, participants stressed that this was a purely scientific, rather than political, undertaking. This paper critically examines this claim that the IGY represented scientific cooperation at the exclusion of politics by focusing on two aspects of the IGY. First, I examine the colonial infrastructure that enabled comprehensive networks of data collection stations while at the same time erasing the contribution of global south and indigenous actors. Second, I examine the construction of an imaginary of the globe as an integrated whole that has and continues to have political implications for global governance and cooperation in the Anthropocene.
