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A Small Team of Scientists Won $1.5 Million for Making the World's Top pH Sensor

The small team took home more than $1 million in prize money at a competition promoting ocean health.
James Beck with the sensor. Image: XPrize

One of the most pressing climate change issues today is the rapid acidification of our world's oceans, and scientists have been working to better document just how quickly the problem is escalating. A new technology showcased at the awards ceremony for the latest XPrize competition Monday will allow scientists to measure the ocean's pH levels with unprecedented accuracy, giving us a better grasp of the problem and a better chance for solutions.

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XPrize is a nonprofit that incentivizes innovation through public science competitions with big cash prizes, promoting new technology in everything from space travel to oil spill cleanup over the years. This competition, called the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPrize, launched in 2012 and targeted an affordable solution for accurately measuring ocean acidity.

XPrize consulted leading experts at agencies like NOAA and found the inability to measure ocean acidification was one of the most pressing issues for ocean conservation. Chris Kellogg, a marine and microbiologist who helped judge the competition, said pH sensor technology that more accurately measures ocean acidification is key to understanding what is going wrong, and lab testing alone doesn't paint a full picture.

"You can measure pH really accurately in a laboratory, but the problem is you need to know what is going on in the ocean," she said. "When you collect a sample of water from the ocean and bring it to the lab, it's still changing, so when you measure it in the lab, it's not what is happening in the ocean."

For the past two years, 70 teams entered the competition, including 18 that actually created hardware and five that made it to the three-month test in controlled laboratory conditions at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and then a month-long performance test in a coastal environment at the Seattle Aquarium. The final challenge was a six-day deep-sea testing phase that gauged each device for accuracy and precision to 3,000 meters depth in the Pacific Ocean.

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The winning team in both categories was Sunburst Sensors LLC, a small team of Montana mechanical engineers and chemists who describe themselves as "inland oceanographers." Hundreds of miles from the nearest coast, the team leader James Beck described lugging five gallon jugs of seawater back for testing after a family vacation to Seattle.

Despite the challenges, the team was able to develop a technology that is 10 to 15 times cheaper than any before and functional in greater depths than ever. It has two pH sensor models: i-SAMI ("i" for inexpensive) and the t-SAMI ("t" for titanium), which won the top prize for affordability and accuracy, and Sunburst was awarded $750,000 for each category. Beck said the win was a big surprise for the 10-person company.

"One of the main things is that we don't want to spend money we don't have, so we haven't even thought about what we are going to do," he said. "We are blown away by the fact that we won both. One of the key things now is to keep pursuing the development of the inexpensive versions."

The devices have a per-unit manufacturing cost of under $1,000 and work by mixing ocean water samples with purified dyes and shining a laser on the sample to determine pH level. Paul Bunje, a senior director at XPrize, said the relatively accessible technology will soon be deployed by scientists monitoring climate change as well as other industries like fish hatcheries and many applications they haven't even thought of yet.

"We are going to see much more ubiquitous scientific explanations of what is happening in our oceans, especially in the deep see where there is so much we don't know," Bunje said. "Immediately it's going to make observation networks able to measure pH, but beyond that, we are actually going to start seeing a lot of use in places like aquaculture facilities. But I'm even more interested in the industries I can't think of. With every XPrize, who knows how people will use their imaginations to apply it.

The development is part of a larger effort to document data from the oceans, which are largely unexplored. Bunje said the competition also represents a broader goal to develop solutions for some of our biggest problems.

"This matters because for every challenge the ocean faces, for every threat, or opportunity we have yet to capitalize on, there are innovators and brilliant folks that really can solve these challenges—we just have to give people an opportunity," he said. "At XPrize we are all about incentivizing the most brilliant innovators, no matter who you are or where you come from."