The extrapolation of planetary surfaces as epidermis has been inextricably linked with the conceptualization of climatic measurement and prediction. Global climate and weather systems have long been a driving application for planetary instrumentation and the understanding of the globe as a “ vast machine. ” <sup>43</sup> The interdependence between the image of infrastructure and the infrastructure of the interfacial image is exemplified as the systems logic of a geographic, bio-informational, planetary-scale epidermal sensing and computation megastructure by — who else? — the Planetary Skin Institute. For this project, the living and breathing geoepidermis is surveyed through a proposed meta-instrumentation of the biosphere into a totally available archived present, open to interested intervention, collaborative management, and quantified governance. Originally launched cooperatively in 2009 by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and Cisco Systems, and now an independent nonprofit research and development platform, Planetary Skin sought to integrate data from many sources into a single, branded geoadministrative mechanism. An internal Cisco white paper describes Planetary Skin as “ an open network platform for real-time, highly distributed mass remote sensing, authentication, risk-profiling, certification and monitoring of carbon stocks and flows that generates trust and enables collaboration between actors in all three sectors (industry, government, academia). ” Its ultimate ambition is to provide an open and comprehensive multiconstituent platform for monitoring and governing planetary biological-ecological systems, with particular emphasis on water distribution and carbon quantification (ultimately to support pricing of these reserve currencies, we imagine). One early pilot project, Rainforest Skin, would measure the total quantity of carbon contained within the planet ’ s rain forests, perhaps the most immediately leverageable carbon governance opportunity and where carbon dioxide sinks are concentrated but threatened by land misuse. The project would combine data sets drawn from “ geo-referenced satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles and multiple ground based sensor networks to estimate the forest ’ s carbon stock and flow dynamics, so as to allow for trading and risk management of this new commodity. ” <sup>44</sup> Stack-scale initiatives such as Planetary Skin (and there are many others) certainly qualify as frames in Grosz ’ s sense, as they frame the totality of Earth at once so as to identify and track strategic chemical subroutines, such as carbon flows, and to present these totalities back to the whole. This sort of speculative megacomputation is but one way that geoscopy, geography , and geopolitics blur and blend into amalgamated images, territories, and governmental techniques and is but one way that The Stack composes the Earth layer.
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Earth Layer