DEEP SEAWATER’S AMBIVALENT ABUNDANCE
My most recent research concerns the relationship obtained in seawater between vertical depth, temperature differentials, (deep) time, and the making of oceanic value through experiments with deep seawater in coastal and island environments.
These interests are distilled principally in the processes of surfacing deep seawater in multi-use flow-through systems, networking ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), seawater air conditioning (SWAC), mariculture, and desalination.
Deep seawater users’ networked technologies of food and energy production in particular present a space for the consideration of historical cross-currents at the interface of natural and built environments. Obtaining energy through OTEC, for example, is a process restricted in potential application to mostly small, mostly tropical, islands. It also figured prominently in mid-20th century discussions of the potential contribution of renewable ocean energy to postcolonial economic development on independent terms. As such, deep seawater stories might engage with efforts to rethink the operative logics and historical understandings of energy transition, small island development, and American and other empire.
These interests are distilled principally in the processes of surfacing deep seawater in multi-use flow-through systems, networking ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC), seawater air conditioning (SWAC), mariculture, and desalination.
Deep seawater users’ networked technologies of food and energy production in particular present a space for the consideration of historical cross-currents at the interface of natural and built environments. Obtaining energy through OTEC, for example, is a process restricted in potential application to mostly small, mostly tropical, islands. It also figured prominently in mid-20th century discussions of the potential contribution of renewable ocean energy to postcolonial economic development on independent terms. As such, deep seawater stories might engage with efforts to rethink the operative logics and historical understandings of energy transition, small island development, and American and other empire.
Makai’s Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion Scale Up. Credit: Jonathan Galka. July 2025.
Multi-purpose OTEC Laboratory control panel, Institute of Ocean Energy (IOES), Saga University, Japan. Credit: Jonathan Galka. March 2025.Historically, this project traces transoceanic connections among sites in the French colonial Caribbean and the West African coast, the U.S. territories of Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, South Pacific small island states, Hawai’i, and Okinawa. Ethnographically, I follow the work that deep, cold, water does, whether chanelled toward the production of aquacultural envirnoments for coldwater fish, shellfish, and mollusks as in contemporary Hawai’i and Japan, bound up in the making of other renewables projects, or circulated as a valuable base and additive for other consumable products.
Altogether this project pursues how scientists’ aspirations to design technologies that facilitate synchronicity with earth systems processes (tapping into a planetary metabolism) have shaped orientations to the ocean as a site of excess, to the role of outside science in democratic governance, and to methods for confronting a (changing) climate.
Altogether this project pursues how scientists’ aspirations to design technologies that facilitate synchronicity with earth systems processes (tapping into a planetary metabolism) have shaped orientations to the ocean as a site of excess, to the role of outside science in democratic governance, and to methods for confronting a (changing) climate.
Juvenile Yezo Abalone shell hot-glued into the palm of a solar-powered tourist souvenir hula dancer at Big Island Abalone. November 2023. 
A schematic of the multi-use deep seawater system installed in Kona, Hawai’i.
Oysters with reduced shell weight grown from spat on nutrient rich deep seawater on Kumejima, Okinawa. Credit: Jonathan Galka, March 2025.
If you’re interested in the historical or contemporary context of oceanic energy generation, especially when it moves across terrestrial and aquatic islanded environments, I’d love to talk about it.