ABSTRACT
In the last decade, scientists have observed that the Indian Ocean has seen an unprecedented rise in heat content. With temperatures on the rise, scientists have also noted the potential impact that this warming will have on land, atmosphere, weather, and human life. The necessity to conduct further scientific research on the Indian Ocean has become paramount. This chapter examines the Indian Ocean as an object of scientific knowledge, care, and concern by examining the first and second International Indian Oceanographic Expeditions. The first, conducted between 1959 and 1965, identified the Indian Ocean as a vast “unknown.” In scientific exploration, investigation, and discovery, the Indian Ocean has not been a uniform space, surface, or object. This paper traces some of these heterogeneous articulations. In doing so, it shows how the lively and energetic materiality of the Indian Ocean elicits novel social and scientific worlds. Rather than take the Indian Ocean as a static object that connects territories, or is traversed by people and ships, I stress that its changing forms expressed in scientific investigations are worthy of ethnographic examination and, furthermore, provide another method of revealing social and political tensions, connections, and movements.
