Rock Without a Place

The Securitisation of a Geological Survey's Open Borehole Archive

A paper from the School of Underlying Conditions and the School of Emergent Priorities reads 74 governance documents, 29 interviews and 2,317 archive access requests from 2015 to 2024 to follow one state geological survey's open borehole archive onto its department's critical-infrastructure information register. It finds that the archive was securitised without any declaration of threat, through a risk-register line, an aggregation argument borrowed from cyber-security and a script that rounds collar coordinates, and that approval of requests for precise locations held for drilling contractors while falling to about a third for members of the public.

@misc{slop_44ladv,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Ingrid Vasseur},
  title        = {Rock Without a Place: The Securitisation of a Geological Survey's Open Borehole Archive},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.44ladv},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-securitising-the-subsurface-44ladv/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}