In 2023 Simone Turchetti, a professor at the University of Manchester, presented a keynote lecture at AIP’s Fifth Early-Career Conference for Historians of the Physical Sciences on the placement of the International Geophysical Year’s World Data Centers. His work on this subject was recently published in Isis under the title, “The World United in Studying Itself? Data and the Coloniality of the International Geophysical Year, 1957–1958.”

A contrary image of the IGY

For decades the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 served as a remarkable example of international collaboration during the height of the Cold War. Popular accounts traced its origins to April 5, 1950, at the house of space scientist James Van Allen in Maryland, where he and five other Western scientists discussed, over tea, a new international research year. The planned IGY would be twenty-five years after the Second Polar Year of 1932-33 and seventy-five after the First Polar Year of 1882-83.

The architects of the IGY, including British mathematician Sydney Chapman and American physicist Lloyd Berkner, played a direct role in selling the IGY as a triumph in international collaboration, calling it “the single most significant peaceful activity of mankind since the Renaissance and the Copernican Revolution” and “the greatest example of world wide scientific cooperation in the history of our race.” Subsequent celebratory accounts, such as that of Belgian physicist Marcel Nicolet, described the IGY’s many meetings as “harmoniously implementing what the six wise men envisioned in Baltimore” (note: the dinner was actually in Silver Spring, near Washington).

Over the past several decades, historians have complicated this rosy picture. Instead of a scientific campaign of equals united in geophysical investigation, the IGY replicated and perpetuated many colonial and geopolitical struggles. Historians have revealed tensions between US and Soviet interests during the IGY, especially in the space race and military-related data gathering, and they have shown the colonial ambitions of the Antarctic Treaty of 1959 that resulted, in part, from IGY activities. The US delegation, moreover, obstructed participation in IGY by the People’s Republic of China by convincing Taiwan’s Academia Sinica to apply for membership to the Comité Spécial de l’Année Géophysique Internationale (CSAGI), a committee established by the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) to organize IGY planning efforts.

Turchetti’s article contributes to this reinterpretation. The planning of the World Data Centers of the IGY, Turchetti argues, especially during the four IGY regional conferences—dominated by the US in Latin America, the Soviets in Eastern Europe, Western Europe in sub-Saharan Africa, and Japan in Asia—was “fundamental to [the IGY’s] coloniality.” While many observers noted that the WDCs ultimately ended up in the hands of the geopolitical superpowers, Turchetti investigates how this came to be, reminding us that this data infrastructure grew out of deliberate decisions, opportunistic planning conferences, and even the rejection of alternatives that would have diversified the geography of the IGY’s WDC system.

Global tensions and scientific negotiations

The planning of the IGY occurred within a rapidly changing geopolitical world. As Turchetti writes:

“The IGY happened at a critical historical juncture characterized by the ongoing decolonization process in Africa and Asia and the growing influence of the superpowers in Latin America and Eastern Europe, respectively. As the Duke of Edinburgh launched the global event at the BBC studios, several countries were on the verge of gaining political independence at the end of the colonial era or, while independent, were falling into new spheres of postcolonial influence.”

As was to be expected, the IGY’s planners took leadership positions from the beginning. The first meeting of the CSAGI invited twenty-four national committees, including committees from India, Pakistan, and Mexico. Berkner was appointed provisional chairman. Chapman was then elected president. In the second meeting of the CSAGI in Rome, now with thirty-six committees, the delegates agreed that the CSAGI would establish World Data Centers (WDCs) for each of the sixteen scientific disciplines. The IGY architects already had locations in mind. Chapman, for example, ginned up support for placing the WDC for auroras at the Carnegie Institution in DC. In general, the committees representing recently decolonized countries were little consulted.

With the inclusion of the Soviet Union at the Rome meeting, competing visions for the placement of WDCs came head-to-head in the third meeting of the CSAGI. Indian geodesist Kalpathi Ramanathan offered his own point of view. In Turchetti’s words, Ramanathan argued that data should “not be taken on the basis of individual national interest but rather to promote the data’s worldwide availability. [Ramanathan] thus supported a geographical spread of data centers that could accommodate the needs of all the committees involved.”

Ramanathan offered a third, more geographically dispersed plan that would have genuinely resisted the consequences of ongoing geopolitical competition. It surprised the IGY architects, such as Chapman, who quickly set up an additional Committee on the Availability of Data. But the US and UK simply did not support this proposal, and within the year the CSAGI endorsed a scheme for WDCs hosted only by the two superpowers.

The following year, two regional conferences held in Latin America and Eastern Europe continued to advocate for the placement of WDCs in only the US and the Soviet Union. The conference in Brazil, which included representatives from nine Latin American countries, implicitly acknowledged US leadership, a position justified by the fact that most Latin American countries received US-made instruments for IGY data gathering.

On what ground, then, could they challenge the US’s position on WDCs? A similar outcome emerged at the Eastern Europe Regional Conference, as Soviets established a “(socialist) division of scientific labor decided entirely in Moscow.” Politically and scientifically, the two conferences reflected, and affirmed, the two spheres of influence in the world.

Recently decolonized countries in Asia and Africa found themselves sidelined in IGY decision making, now exacerbated by the nonalignment politics of the 1955 Bandung Conference—the first Asian-African Conference of mostly newly independent states—and the Suez Crisis in 1956. Jawaharlal Nehru insisted that the West was “risking a war” in the Middle East by threatening Egypt’s sovereignty. The crisis ultimately “dampened opposition” from recently decolonized countries in the CSAGI. Ramanathan, for example, did not attend the CSAGI meeting in Barcelona.

Data infrastructure in the image of geopolitical power

To be sure, there was continued opposition to the two superpowers’ control of WDCs, but it came from Western Europe. As Turchetti explains, more traditional colonial alignments appeared as Western European powers exerted control over IGY planning in Africa. At a regional conference in Bukavu, on the eastern border of Belgian Congo, Western European delegates demanded to host WDCs. Co-organized with the Scientific Council for Africa, which was made up entirely of European and settler scientists, the conference agreed to establish a “center for geodesy and geophysics” in Bukavu to organize regional IGY activities and send data back to proposed WDCs in Europe.

Shortly after the Bukavo conference, Berkner suggested that a CSAGI conference also be held in Asia. Japan gladly agreed to host in Tokyo, an opportunity, as they saw it, to take advantage of scientific dependency in the region, re-exerting control in Asia after the dissolution of its colonial empire in the 1940s. Japan invited Soviet, PRC, Indian, and Indonesian committees, causing concern from the US. But the CSAGI conference went forward. As a sign of political strength, the US delegation sent fourteen attendees, opposed to the PRC’s eight and the USSR’s three. Japan’s delegation, however, outnumbered the US, showing, as they stated directly, their ability to host WDCs for the entire region.

By April of 1957, the locations of WDCs had been set, dispersed among the US, Soviet Union, Western Europe, and Japan—Ramanathan’s proposal long forgotten. As Turchetti concludes:

“The representatives of a few scientifically developed nations seized the IGY data output of most experimental observations under the false pretext that setting up WDCs in their own countries would increase the global availability of data. The annual CSAGI meetings and the four regional IGY conferences outlined a data structure that conferred exclusive hosting privileges on the US, the Soviet Union, Western Europe, and Japan, while leaving the other committees in subordinate positions, often compelled to transfer precious data resources extracted in their countries.”

Even with the WDCs set, the actual flow of data, in practice, remained a constant process of negotiation and strategic control. Data flowed much more smoothly between allies. Only a few national committees outside of Eastern Europe, for example, sent their data readily to Moscow, and the Soviet Union had to step in and press the other committees to send their data to the Soviet center. The WDC-A coordination office in the United States kept a special paper trail of “Russian data,” separate from other data collection, to make sure that Soviet data transfer was adequate and timely. And these asymmetries traveled in many directions. The Soviet Union did not participate in the IGY’s nuclear radiation program, yet it received data from the program via American and British subcenters.

As Turchetti reminds us, the building of scientific and data infrastructures does not just produce accidental asymmetries. Rather, it reflects deliberate decisions that leave lasting consequences, empowering certain communities in scientific investigations while neglecting others. The location, access, and availability of data, Turchetti asserts, are essential to the maintenance and development of scientific enterprises. The IGY, as both an impressive feat of international collaboration and a product of geopolitical realities, accepted and built a geographically concentrated data infrastructure controlled by the world’s superpowers.

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Vince Femia
American Institute of Physics
vfemia@aip.org

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