Abstract
This thesis questions the narrative on the “ocean Frontier” through the study of a geographical object in the making, the Costa Rica Dome. This narrative, particularly strong in scientific, political and economic arenas over the past years, builds on views of oceans’ openness and emptiness as opportunity for human expansion and control. It has especially accompanied the growth and diversification of ocean uses since the end of 20th century, at a time of unprecedented anthropogenic impacts and concerns over the trespassing of planetary boundaries. Within this momentum, different actors strive to reach remote and deep oceans. Among these spaces, the “Costa Rica Dome” began to be defined in the mid-20th century by oceanographers during the development of tuna fisheries in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. The Dome qualifies a mobile and labile thermal event, the rise of cold, nutrient-rich “upwelled” waters closer to the surface between the High Seas and the Exclusive Economic Zones mainly of Costa Rica and Nicaragua. This research explores this phenomenon’s social construction in the three main fields that have approached it: oceanographic sciences, fisheries, and biodiversity conservation. It relies on an inductive, qualitative methodological approach joining in-depth interviews, textual analyses and ethnographic observations carried out partly online, in France, and during fieldwork with different maritime sectors in Costa Rica.Since its inception as a social object, the Dome has remained an offshore space, hardly accessible, manageable or governable to actors who have deployed various strategies to know and utilize it. Oceanographic research has increasingly mobilized remote technical mediation to decipher a geophysical space with fuzzy contours. Various fisheries, especially industrial and from distant-water fishing nations, recurrently came close to the Dome’s occurrence. These encounters nevertheless did not prove strategic on a stable basis and fishers still relate to it as a fluid space whose dynamic configurations serve them in labile ways. More recently, the Dome has also become a subject for the global marine conservation sector. Under the leadership of Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations, it is being constructed as a geography of promise to advocate governance solutions for the protection of biodiversity in the High Seas. Yet, as an offshore feature, the Dome appears at the limit of the human world. Beyond appropriation, it invites us to consider a narrative other than the Frontier.