In China, oil wells up to 240 metres deep already existed in 347 BCE. Humans have been digging into the earth for millennia – deep mines were already known in antiquity. Here, however, I focus mainly on oil and gas extraction. Obviously, this human foray into the earth did not only involve fossil fuels but all sorts of minerals. In this piece, however, I want to chart a more experimental course and look, from a broader dis:connective as well as historical and contemporary angle, at oil and gas drilling as connecting and disconnecting the world above with its lithosphere − what one could tentatively call lithospheric connectivity. Specifically, I am investigating the imperial infrastructures in situ that made such extraction possible and that bound commodities into global networks of extraction and consumption, creating new connections while simultaneously diverting or cutting others. Since August 2021, I have been researching early colonial oil extraction (ca. What if global dis:connectivity stretches not only around the surface of our globe, but also into its crust? Let me present some initial thoughts on this idea from the perspective of global oil and gas extraction since the nineteenth century. In Blog 2022 lithospheric connectivity tom menger He saw in oil a weapon, and he heard groaning in the bowels of the Earth when the jack pumped up the oil (…) From Varujan Vosganian’s novel Book of Whispers (2018 )
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