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Through the case study of the contested British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, this paper contributes to discussions on 'territorial volumes' by exploring the role of the 'elemental' in the protracted sovereignty dispute between Spain and Gibraltar. Drawing on scholarship by Elden, Adey, McCormack and others in political and cultural geography, the paper highlights the value of foregrounding the elements of rock, water, air and fire (in the form of the sun) in attempts to understand the tensions between Gibraltar and Spain whilst also demonstrating the significant intersections between the elemental and the human body. Whilst avoiding the snares of environmental determinism, the paper makes the case for an elemental ontology that functions through and with the proclivities and molecular specificities of the elements in order to better understand the construct of the territorial volume, the relationship between elemental and bodily volumes, and the site specific geopolitical realities, fractures and possibilities that are laid bare as the elements are unearthed.

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Recent scholarship in political geography and allied disciplines such as Anthropology and Architecture has used registers such as the elemental and volumetric to explore the calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through and beneath the earth's surface. In this special issue, our contributors engage in a 'subterranean turn', as they drill down, dive into, travel through and speculate with underground and underwater domains. Although varied in their geographical environments and locales, and diverse in their time-frames, the papers speak to four themes that constitute a 'subterranean geopolitics.' First, the subterranean is conceptualised as volume with distinct material qualities including height, pressure, depth and shape. There are multiple undergrounds on offer. Second, the subterranean is integral to nation-state building and geopolitical strategies of control, enclosure and exclusion. Third, there is evidence of and for subterranean infrastructures aplenty. States and other actors want to design, experiment and plan with the underground and underwater environments. Finally, the subterranean is never divorced from calculative, legal and technical regimes of regulation, and the cultivation of expertisescientific, military, engineeringis a crucial element in these contributions to subterranean geopolitics. Taken together, the nine papers in this special issue offer a rich array of case studies including the nineteenth-century volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean (Hawkins 2018), subterranean nationalism in the South Atlantic (Benwell), lead mining in nineteenth-century English Peak District (Endfield and Van Lieshout 2019), a transnational gas pipeline running through Italy (Barry and Gambino 2019), subterranean security in Israel/Palestine (Slesinger 2019), natural gas infrastructure (Forman 2019), deep sea mining off Papua New Guinea (Childs 2019b), US military planning in and under Greenland's inland ice (Bruun 2018), and managing the shipping routes of the English Channel (Peters 2019).

Like territory, terrain is a term that has been tied to its etymological roots on terra. This paper seeks to release terrain as both concept and practice from the terrestrial through an analysis of the Cold Warera case study, Sealab II. This little-studied project, led by the US Navy, sought to establish the feasibility of sustaining life under the sea and in doing so, provides a rich site of analysis through which to explore the notion of terrain that exists in volume, rather than simply on the earth's crust. Within this immersive voluminous framework, the function of the body is also re-examined as both a site that experiences terrain, but also one that became a terrain of sorts during the Sealab experiments. The paper concludes by suggesting that understandings of terrain within geographical scholarship would be enriched were they to push off from the earth's surfaces and argues that there is a need to re-think terrain's relational aspects, re-root it from terra and re-orientate it towards the body.