The ocean is the cornerstone, the blue heart of our life support system.
It has been stable for millions of years.
I think if you ask anyone, is the ocean important to them, they will probably say yes.
We all somehow seem to be touched.
Oceans are such a vital part of our planet.
There is such amazing biodiversity.
Human civilization depends on the ocean, and it's given us the stable climate that
humans have thrived upon.
The oceans provide the oxygen that we breathe, the food that we eat, the water that we drink.
We're burning coal and oil to get energy to make our lives more comfortable.
From this, we're also putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Some of that carbon dioxide, about 30%, ends up in the oceans, changing the ocean's chemical
composition.
We're adding 2.3 billion metric tons of carbon into the oceans every year.
It has changed, without question, the chemistry of the oceans by the global scale.
The last time the ocean was as acidic as it is now, it was 50 million years ago, and
that change occurred over millennia, not over decades.
We used to take the ocean at an infinite capacity to accept abuse.
We know that isn't true.
Life in the ocean is sensitive to the chemistry of the ocean.
Change the acidity, you're changing everything.
The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize is a two-year competition worth $2 million for
teams to create radical breakthroughs in the measurement technology.
The point of this competition is to accurately measure ocean acidification for the first
time.
It alerts people to the fact that we've got a problem.
So important that somebody's willing to put up private resources as a reward.
One of the goals of this prize is to bring more instruments to the problem.
We have 50 pitiful amount of data.
We need the measurements to know exactly what's going on.
This is a real opportunity to start fresh with new tools and a new data set that the
public understands what we're doing to the global oceans.
First thing is they had to go through the laboratory trials where we created a controlled
environment to determine just how well they measured the pH of ocean water.
The teams that could make it through that phase went on to the semi-finals, the coastal
trials in Seattle, where they had to experience a full month of measuring the chemistry of
Puget Sound.
Only the top five finalists were announced for opportunity to go on to the deep sea trials
and eligibility for the $2 million grand prize purse.
We're Team A&B.
I'm Team Sunders.
Team Sylam.
Team HBHS.
Team Durafat.
And we're ready for phase four.
Boom!
Building a sensor is a hard thing.
It's got to build a little tiny instrument that's going to find this part per billion
of a part per billion in the ocean.
It's got to stay out in the water and crushing pressures and sift through all the water molecules
and all the salt and counting.
We had about 20 sensors in this massive tank measuring things that are happening in the
water that led to corrosion on the metals that were holding onto these sensors.
I was not surprised that there were complications.
I was a bit surprised that in particular it was this corrosion.
Nobody thought this could be this rapid a corrosion.
So we brought in these experts, identified the problem, resolved it, and were able to
move through on the competition.
But there was a point where most of us didn't know if there would be a winner.
It looks like some of the spigots at the top screwed themselves loose.
Some are completely missing, some are just loose.
Very uncommon.
That's why we run the competitions out here because you can't do it in a lab.
You've got to do it out at sea, but damn it's freaking frustrating to be honest with you.
From complete concept to competition, we had about four weeks to develop the sensor.
The first 3,000 meter cast was five hours of anxiously waiting to see if anything survived.
Team A and B had essentially a structural failure of their casing.
Plastics tend to deform at depth.
They can be problematic.
The battery compartment completely compressed and destroyed the battery so they lost power.
The data recorded all the way down until that crushing happened.
It's about 2,400 meters.
The furthest test we had done before this was three meters in depth.
So getting to 2,400 meters is a real achievement for us.
The exciting part of the competition is seeing the team scramble to find a resolution.
I think these challenges are good.
That's what makes a more robust, better sensor in the end.
Most people only experience the oceans from 35,000 feet.
They look down and say, this is really big.
How could we possibly be affecting this?
Down the road, I would like to be able to do an ocean pH forecast much the same way we
look at a weather forecast.
We've proven that innovators can solve the grand challenge of building a breakthrough
pH sensor.
The next step is all of the rest of the world being inspired to take this and solve the
challenge of ocean acidification.
It's been really great, the excitement every single day as we broke record after record
with pH sensors.
Go, man!
It's going to totally change the way oceanography gets done.
The ocean is critical to keeping us alive.
And again, we have as good a chance as we now have to take action.
