New X Prize Quest: Sensors To Probe Oceanic Acid Levels 91
cold fjord notes that the X Prize Foundation has opened up a new mission: to quantify the acidification of the world's oceans, excerpting from a description on Nature's blog of the project's focus: "Scientists who study ocean acidification must confront a fundamental problem: It is hard to measure exactly how much the ocean's pH is changing. Today's sensors don't work well at depth or over long periods of time, and they are too expensive to deploy widely. That is where the US$2 million Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize comes in. The 22-month competition will award two $1 million prizes, one to the best low-cost sensor and one to the most accurate. The competition's organizers decided to award two prizes because the two goals present different engineering challenges. ... As carbon dioxide levels rise in the atmosphere, ocean water takes up some of the gas and becomes more acidic. This can harm shell-building marine life like coral, whose calcium carbonate skeletons dissolve in the increasingly acidic water. All of this research is bedeviled by the simple lack of technology to monitor ocean pH in real time across the world."
Re:Whey do they need real-time results? (Score:4, Informative)
The real issue is not real-time but automated data collection and gathering.
For this to be helpful there would need to be many many of these operating (at a range of depths) worldwide.
The logistics and costs of gathering the data manually from each would probably be prohibitive.
Doing this sort of thing for years... (Score:4, Informative)
These people have been doing this sort of thing for years.
http://cmdac.oce.orst.edu/osu/history.html [orst.edu]
http://kepler.oce.orst.edu/ [orst.edu]
Re:Doing this sort of thing for years... (Score:4, Informative)
You do realize that current meters measure water speed, not pH. Right?
Re:Never has so much been spent for hype (Score:3, Informative)
Quite so. Even if all of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were to get absorbed into the oceans it would barely register as a change in pH. For all of that money, why not train some environmentalists in basic chemistry?
Re:Paelo History (Score:5, Informative)
No he's trying to point you to a previous mass extinction caused by ocean acidification. Technically life did "adapt" but it took a length of time to recover that I wouldn't say is tolerable for a human civilization.
Open up for spoon feeding! Here comes the choo-choo!
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/april/prehistoric-mass-extinction-042710.html [stanford.edu]
Re:Paelo History (Score:2, Informative)
I think animals with shells survived well enough in the past when atmospheric CO2 levels were far, far higher. They'll adapt.
Oh, the irony.
The actual paleobiological literature suggests this statement is wrong in every particular. Not only is ocean acidification implicated in the worst mass extinction in the history of mulitcellular life (see here [stanford.edu] [PDF] or here [gsapubs.org])-- although it may not have been the main kill mechanism-- it may actually be a general cause of mass extinctions (see here [wiley.com]). If it is, that would be very interesting; it would be the only general mechanism for mass extinctions that I am aware of.
Moreover, natural selection operates differently during a mass extinction. Selective pressures are wildly different from those operating "normally." The usual rules do not apply-- traits that were previously advantageous no longer matter, or may even be detrimental. One of the very few qualities which seems to enhance the odds of survival is species-level geographic range, and in a really bad mass extinction, even that can stop being important, giving way to clade-level geographical range. I'm astonished that you could make a blithe statement like "they'll adapt" without consulting the relevant literature; in particular, we have strong evidence that animals with calcium carbonate shells fared very poorly in the past when atmospheric CO2 levels were far, far higher, and did not "survive well enough."
Re:Paelo History (Score:1, Informative)
I think that's pretty unlikely. Life is constantly adapting to change. That's the whole point.
Mass extinction is unlikely?
You do know we're already in a mass extinction event?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [wikipedia.org]