Jason and the Argonauts: temporality, usability, and tacit knowledge in Argo Ocean monitoring
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2024.25Keywords:
Argo, Oceanography, Monitoring, Personal experience, Tacit knowledgeAbstract
The Argo marine monitoring system, launched in 1999, provides a continuum of data collected on a global grid by an army of 4,000 self-floating buoys that automatically submerge and surface to send the information via satellite. According to its promoters, this is a new way of doing oceanography: the possibility of constant monitoring enables scientists to build models of global change. The vision that Argo provides of the variability of seas and oceans complements that of the Jason satellite and others in the objective of producing estimates of the state of the marine environment and its transformations. To meet its goal, the buoys and the data they produce have to meet the requirements of durability, usability and reliability. This article discusses the role of tacit or experiential knowledge in ensuring these requirements. Specifically, scientists acting as Argo experts combine a knowledge of sensors, buoys and the marine environment which equips them to identify anomalies in a way that is difficult to automate. Studying the role of tacit knowledge in a context apparently far removed from artisanal knowledge allows us to assess to what extent Argo's durability and usability infrastructures produce a new kind of ocean and a new style of doing oceanography and to what extent they maintain pre-existing epistemological structures.
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Funding data
Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
Grant numbers PID2019-111054GB-100
European Research Council
Grant numbers ERC-CoG-101002330
