thank you turkey is planning to double its summer in fleet in the next 10 years according to the turkish minister of foreign affairs the goal is to protect research being conducted in what turkey considers to be its continental shelf now conflicts between turkey and greece over territorial waters well of course for many many years but their present form has to do with submarines and with underwater oil and gas exploration it would seem thus that the conflict needs to be disentangled historically and yet we still lack an account of the interplay between science and strategy in
the deep mediterranean my name is lino capravi and i'm here to present you the deep med project the first history of how humans have gained access to and engaged with deep mediterranean environment my main hypothesis is that science and strategy have co-evolved to produce new perceptions of the mediterranean as a three-dimensional space a brief sketch in the 1960s both the existence of deep life and of deep currents were demonstrated for the first time here in dc later on with the introduction of submarines and anti-submarine devices knowledge about the underwater world boomed and i mean i
can't show you any maps but the developments are really astonishing during the cold war and world war ii the presence of submarines in the mediterranean exploded and i mean to give you an idea in 1958 a soviet sub was chasing a u.s vessel just for training without knowing that eisenhower was on board i mean imagine what could have happened right if anything had gone wrong so this kind of intense activity necessitated an equally intense scientific activity later in the 20th century onwards environmental monitoring and security surveillance have worked together to produce new visions of the
environment in which we now focus on systemic changes unlike in the times of brodel we know that politics do shape the environment to complicate this narrative and also to develop deep met's three main objectives i will focus on topography so how different and often competing visions of the mediterranean have developed temporalities the human and natural times interaction in deep environments and globalities the new roles of the mediterranean for global scientific and strategic affairs there are good reasons to be confident in the success of this approach in my previous work i have endeavoured to bring together
the history of science and technology with the history of politics and diplomacy one example is my retelling of francoise political history through engineering which by the way i'm happy to say won the best book prize of the international committee of the history of technology another example is my rewriting of the recent history of colonial sahara through geophysics and it turns out that science and strategy are close historical actors following that path i have already obtained preliminary results for the deep med with free papers in which i showed that the strategic significance of gibraltar and elsewhere
grew together with new knowledge about these areas it is precisely to go beyond these results that i'm asking you to fund this project because with a consolidator grant i would be able to develop an approach that is truly regional and a methodology that is transnational and disciplinary and at the same time digital transnational and interdisciplinary because it would allow me to attract a team of excellent researchers with very disciplinary and linguistic backgrounds including in particular russian and arabic the digital component of volumet is hard labor and it requires expertise but the gains will be enormous
because it will be a breakthrough in special maritime history and we will upload the results to existing repositories the deep med brings together human and natural sciences highlighting interactions between human action and natural environments its benefits will go beyond academia informing public views of the mediterranean as a whole and providing tools for imagining better futures so thank you very much for your attention
