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."
Whey do they need real-time results? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do they need real-time results? If you can get clean samples and ship them back to the lab, what's wrong with that?
Re:Never has so much been spent for hype (Score:0, Insightful)
The oceans aren't acidifying - they are alkaline and there are massive buffers in the oceans chemistry that prevent it changing very much.
One might make the same claim with mother natures way of balancing itself naturally, but PT Barnum said it best, which catalyzed people like Gore to make billions off baffling people with bullshit. Money talks.
Oceans are basic... (Score:4, Insightful)
...any sensors will be measuring ocean *neutralization* as pH moves down towards 7.
Re:Paelo History (Score:4, Insightful)