X Prize Foundation Announces Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize

There?s a large potential market for inexpensive, easy-to-use sensors that includes anyone who needs information and data on ocean pH. We?re trying to catalyze a broader ?ocean services market? that is analogous to the current weather services market. It would provide the data, information, and forecasts of what?s happening in the oceans from a physical, chemical, and biological perspective. Right now there is no ocean services market. But there are a lot of marine industries at play, almost all of which can use some information about what?s going on in the ocean, but very few of them have it in a coordinated way.

Consider aquaculture facilities [or] shellfish hatcheries, for instance, where the quality of the water can greatly impact their bottom line. A significant change in pH can mean the difference between an entire season?s worth of oyster larvae being lost or not. In fact, there are a number of hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest that experience natural acidic events [such as] an upwelling of the California current, when deep waters that are naturally more acidic come up. A few years ago, the largest of these hatcheries, Whiskey Creek in Oregon, experienced one of these upwelling events, and for lack of a $100 sensor, they lost about 80 percent of the larvae of their oysters and killed about two years? production.

In the future, you could see a situation where the captain of a fishing boat trying to make a decision about whether or not he could make it to a valuable fishing ground on a set amount of fuel. That would require data not just about what weather patterns are looking like that day, but also what the ocean currents are looking like, but also temperature currents at depth, as well as certain aspects of ocean chemistry and maybe even plankton growth. None of that exists right now, but you can imagine a world in which there is a third-party private sector like AccuWeather is now, synthesizing all that data into a very simple response to a fisherman: ?There is a high likelihood of fish being in this location, and it?s this far from you.?

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/climate-change/x-prize-foundation-ocean-health-prize-15905878?src=rss

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