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Furthermore, Beaudry alludes to a central aspect of US visions of the ice sheet as a terrain, namely the ambition to not only transcend the material complexities of the landscape, but to simultaneously draw on the unique operational potentialities of the ice sheet as a vertical and voluminous sub-terrain (DUPI [34]). Standing out as the longest trek of its kind, the 1955 glaciological expedition, Project Jello, offers a telling example of how US desires to enlist the ice sheet as a terrain inspired them to reach into the very fabric of the ice sheet[5] - even when terrain was envisioned as surface. The subterranean geopolitics of the ice sheet terrain rested somewhere between its physicality and what the scientists, engineers, and military planners made of it; how they interpreted and framed matter and its inherent vibrancy, how they negotiated the temporality and liveliness of ice, and how they subsequently (re)assembled the ice sheet as a coherent territorial whole. The US scientific insertions in Greenland, of which Jello and the experiments at Camp Fistclench represented two minor factions, cast Greenland as part of its vast territorial network stretching across the Arctic and beyond.[12] Since SIPRE helped the US military gain epistemological access to the ice sheet and its deep structures, their calculative enactments of terrain were arguably key to establishing Greenland as a territory of US control. [Extracted from the article]

This paper examines the topological entanglements between the naturalistic field and natural history archives, arguing that the spatial categories of 'field' and 'archive' should be considered in terms of their indexical relations. Conceptually, it points to the prosthetic qualities of the archive, namely its capacity to simultaneously delimit and expand the field by facilitating novel ways of seeing and knowing it. The field, in turn, is a necessary source of plant and animal matter without which there is no archive. Bringing together geographical literatures on 'field' and 'archive' with literature on cultures and practices of collecting, this intervention is at once conceptual and empirical. The conceptual debate is hinged to, and inspired by, the practices of collecting, classifying, and ordering Arctic ecologies by the three Oxford University Arctic Expeditions to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard) in 1921-24. These expeditions have been hailed as significant episodes in the history of ecology. While ecology as a discipline shared an ordering impulse with the archive, early twentieth-century ecologists were explicitly distancing themselves from practices they associated with 'armchair science'. This paper exemplifies how field-archive dialogue remained central to the practices of ecology. Reading field collecting and subsequent specimen analysis as processes of active archiving, the paper hones in on select moments and practices which connected Spitsbergen-as-field and UK archival institutions, such as the British Museum of Natural History. In doing so, the paper draws out the distributed nature of archive and field alike, pointing to the non-limited locality of both localised field operations and archival practices, as well as the co-constitutional nature of these two sites of knowledge production., (The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). © 2022 The Author. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers).)