To execute this massive land manipulation project, The US Army Corps of Engineers uses an extensive number of (relatively) small instruments such as barges, geotubes, mechanical dredges, hydraulic dredges, cutter dredges, dragheads, suction pipes, trucks, tractors, backhoes, geotextiles, pumps, and silt fences, amongst others. It should be no surprise that the largest dredging organization in the United States is a branch of the army, given that logistics itself was born from military operations. Given the complexity of engineering a logistical cycle to counter geology, dredging is currently a highly top-down process. Ironically, dredging accelerates the forces of erosion that they are established to counter, thus stimulating more-and-more dredging.
It is cyclical because it is constantly driven by anthropogenic influences that produce erosion (urbanization, agriculture, deforestation, damming, etc.) and the desire to tame the effects of these forces that cause shoreline fluctuations. This ceaseless process of dredging – the co-making of hydrological and geologic processes – has been termed the ‘dredge cycle’. Accordingly, dredging is continually reconciling the meeting of anthropogenic forces on land with shipping logistics on water. The combination of integrated globalized shipping as well as growing ship sizes has created logistical routes that, as they approach shallower depths close to urbanized areas, require incessant dredging to counter the natural tendencies of erosion and sediment movement. Currently in the United States alone, more than four hundred ports and over 25,000 miles of navigation channels are being dredged.
Like the logistics of the global shipping industry it serves, dredging is a continual process whose magnitude and significance have fostered their own series of ‘geologics’ – the engineering of material processes that operate in temporal and spatial scales that are geological in scope. The primary impetus for dredging is to sustain logistical routes for the shipping industry by countering the forces of erosion, movement, and settling of sediments.
Dredging is the excavation, gathering, transport, and disposal of sediment from subaquatic areas, enacted to maintain depths of shipping channels, harbors, and ports as well as to reclaim land, create sea defences, and remove toxic chemicals. This ongoing battle between geology and industry is most apparent through the act of dredging. The movement and management of sediment is arguably the largest continuous project of spatial manipulation on the planet. You can read the Editorial of this issue, How Much Does Your System Weigh?, here. The following article was first published by Volume Magazine in their 47th issue, The System*.
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