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New X Prize Quest: Sensors To Probe Oceanic Acid Levels
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."
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.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
And are they hiring?
Have gnu, will travel.
These people have been doing this sort of thing for years.
http://cmdac.oce.orst.edu/osu/history.html
http://kepler.oce.orst.edu/
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...any sensors will be measuring ocean *neutralization* as pH moves down towards 7.
The object is to learn what's happening in the ocean, not to change it. Whether something can adapt to changes is a completely different issue. Even if everything can adapt to pH changes in the ocean, it's no reason not to study whether the ocean is changing and why or why not. In addition, developing low cost, accurate remote sensors will undoubtedly have applications several other fields.
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
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel