X Prize unveils $2 million ocean acid award

Dan Vergano | USA TODAY

Increasing acidity in the world's oceans serves as the backdrop for a $2 million prize competition unveiled Monday by the X Prize Foundation.

Scheduled to be awarded in 2015, the prize competition hopes to kick-start marine monitoring technology efforts with the world's oceans now roughly 30% more acidic than in the past due to global warming emissions. The newly announced competition will split its purse into two $1 million prizes. One will go to an accurate deep-water acidity monitor, and one will be for an inexpensive shallow-water monitor, devices now missing in the arsenal of today's marine scientists.

"The prize is really a first salvo in our efforts to understand what we are up against in the ocean," says Paul Bunje of the X Prize Foundation, based in Playa Vista, Calif. Best known for spacecraft design competitions, the foundation has turned its attention to health care and environmental challenges as well in recent years. "We want to to serve as an engine for innovation in marine technology," Bunje says.

Ocean water is actually slightly alkaline, not acidic, but increased carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossils fuels have shifted the chemistry of seawater in that direction. The effect has been seen in coastal measurements made by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research cruises and by West Coast oyster farmers who have repeatedly seen shellfish hatcheries decimated by upwellings of more corrosive seawater over the last decade. The cause is the ocean's absorption of about 23% of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions, according to a 2012 Earth System Science Data journal report, more than 8 billion tons of it every year.

Much of that carbon dioxide ends up as excess carbonic acid absorbed into seawater.But researchers don't have a great handle on exactly how, where and how much, Bunje and other experts say, because of the shortfall in cheap, accurate and reliable sensor technology that the prize aims to fix.

"We are changing the chemistry of the oceans that tens of millions of people depend upon to survive and we don't have good enough ways to know what is going on there," says Frances Beinecke of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group based in New York. "I think this prize is a great way of focusing on getting us what we need to know, and don't now, about the ocean."

The prize competition will end with four finalists undergoing ocean trials of their sensors, aimed at testing accuracy, durability and the flexibility to form a network of thousands of acidity sensors under real-world conditions. Understanding how ocean acidification impacts coral reefs that serve as nurseries for sea life and the marine plankton that creates half of the oxygen we breathe is an urgent concern for many ocean researchers. "We think competitions are a great way to not only deliver us the technology we need but to raise the public's understanding of this problem," Bunje says.



