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The invention of near-instantaneous combustion – the fiery explosion – is an event in both in planetary and human history. While the concoction of a volatile mix of carbon, sulfur and nitrates by alchemists in 9th century China paved the way for firearms and gunpowder empires, ultra-highspeed deflagration is also arguably the first entirely new form of combustion on Earth since fire emerged in the Silurian Period some 410 million years ago. What does it mean, I ask, that the explosion is at once instrumental in the global rise of Western powers and a planetary event that exceeds the practices, strategies and imaginaries that organize its deployment? In this chapter I explore two related paradoxes of explosive firepower. The first is that the relatively rapid technological transfer of the firearm from China to Europe is at once a source of profound trauma for the ‘modernizing’ European subject and a key component in the triumphalist narrative of Western global expansion. The second is that the application of explosives in extractive industries both plays an important role in advancing the understanding of the geological strata – and hence the deep history of the Earth, and is of pivotal importance in transforming Earth systems and rock fabrics to such an extent that the very legibility of the Earth and is compromised. Extending the idea of planetary social thought (Clark and Szerszynski 2021), the chapter brings these paradoxes together as a way to reimagine Western colonization as a pyrogeographical process: at once a variation played on firepower of the Earth and an instrument of a specific world-shaping structural violence.

When engineers drilling geothermal boreholes in Iceland’s volcanically active Krafla region in 2009 unexpectedly struck a magma body some two kilometres down it opened up the possibility both of studying magma in situ and of using heat from magma directly as an energy source. Recognizing the novelty of this event, I explore some of the ways that magma might become politicized over the coming years—using a conceptual framework that involves three distinct, though related, approaches to the political geology of magma. The first, drawing on political ecology, looks at how power from magma fits into Iceland’s recent energy-intensive, capital-attracting development strategy. The second, taking insights from relational materialist thought, considers how the specific properties of magma might trigger new political mobilizations. The third, more speculative and philosophical in tone, reflects on how we might see magma and other geological forces as the very condition of possibility of the political—as forms of ‘geopower’ that antecede, subtend and energise all social and political formations. Taken together, these three approaches suggest an open, experimental approach to the formation of new political issues and subjects in which new kinds of ‘becoming with magma’ defy prediction.

In this chapter I argue that we can start to extend political ideas to other entities within the Earth through deploying an intermediary concept such as ‘memory’. In the domain of human politics, there has been much attention to the role of collective memory in the politics of recognition and justice – but also the role that active forgetting can play in creating the conditions for progressive social change. What about the politics of the Earth? Natural scientists sometimes us the word ‘memory’ to describe biological or even geophysical process: they talk of ‘climate memory’, or ‘ecological memory’, or materials as having ‘shape memory’. But what would happen if we took such usages seriously, and applied the idea of memory to a complex entity like a planet? How could the Earth be said to remember and to forget? What memory systems has the Earth evolved in its 4.5 billion-year ‘geostory’? And if the Earth is indeed entering ‘the Anthropocene’, a new geological epoch in which humans are the determining geological force, how might the Anthropocene be inserting itself into the memory systems of the Earth? Might thinking of the Earth as something that remembers and forgets change the way that we think about this thing we call the Anthropocene, what it is and what it means?