New tools to track ocean’s pH may be within reach, thanks to X Prize’s $2 million offer.
The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize, the most recent multi-million dollar prize program which aims to reward modernization tools that decreases the cost and improves the precision of chemical censors is carried out by the X Prize Foundation, based in California.
The previous prizes were given to technologies related to energy-efficient vehicles to commercial spaceflight, but the latest one targets an even huger global problem-- climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration affirmed that our open oceans, as they take in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, are getting more acidic which can possibly take its devastating toll on shellfish, coral reefs and enormous amount of humans who depend on the ocean for their daily survival.
Paul Bunje, senior director of the X Prize Foundation and the lead scientist behind the ocean health competition told NBC News, "It is only in the last decade where scientists have begun to study ocean acidification, so our knowledge is really limited still."
He added, "But we do know that we don't know enough, and we don't have the tools needed to even begin to measure it sufficiently — much less to begin to respond, to adapt to it, to implement local policies that might allow ocean acidification to be less harmful.”
The Ocean Health X Prize’s goal is to initiate a new business venture committed to improving understanding of the oceans, like acidification.
The open ocean’s acidity increases at about .02 pH units every 10 years, said Richard Feeley, the leading researcher on ocean acidification at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle at NBC News. He added that a precise and accurate instrument should be developed to stand a long period of time, so that it can display a significant change.
A $1 million prize is at stake to the team who will be able to invent a cheap pH sensor that is at least as precise as the current instruments and another $1 million to the team who will create the most precise sensor with materials amounting to less than $10,000 during the 22-month long ocean health competition.
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