海角大神

The prestigious X Prize Foundation has announced a new competition geared at tackling ocean acidification, which has in recent years taken a hard hit at some of the ocean鈥檚 hardest-bodied animals.

The 22-month competition, slated to open for submissions at the beginning of 2014, carries a total purse prize of $2 million for the developers of a pH sensor capable of measuring the acidification of the world鈥檚 oceans, a poorly understood process visible in deteriorating coral reefs and struggling oyster populations.

Called the , the award is the latest multimillion dollar venture from the X Prize Foundation, the fund made famous as a catalyst for private spaceflight. In 2004, the foundation awarded $10 million to aerospace company Scaled Composites for the commercial spacecraft prototype that now underpins Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo, which聽boomed closer to market-readiness last week with another supersonic test flight.

This latest prize is also the second collaborative effort between X Prize and philanthropist Wendy Schmidt, the wife of Eric Schmidt, Google鈥檚 executive chairman. Ms. Schmidt had in 2011 previously joined with X Prize to fund the $1.3 million .

Ocean acidification begins, as most climate change stories do, with fossil fuel burning and burgeoning atmospheric聽CO2 levels. As CO2 levels rise, the ocean鈥檚 levels of the gas also rise: the world鈥檚 oceans absorb about a quarter of the atmosphere鈥檚 CO2, an intake that reduces the seawater鈥檚 pH, as well as the water's concentration of the calcium carbonate minerals that support the formation of marine life鈥檚 skeletons and shells.

Over the last 250 years, and after absorbing some 530 billion tons of CO2, the planet鈥檚 oceans have experienced a roughly in ocean acidity, a galling percentage after about 20 million years of pre-industrial period acidic stability.

And while the world鈥檚 oceans are still alkaline, that is expected to change. Projections for future acidification show that the Southern Ocean, which abuts Antarctica, will , if current CO2 emissions rates continue. The reduction in pH levels has already been recorded as upending food webs and taxing fisheries, as it takes a toll on the oysters farmed in the US鈥檚 West Coast and on Bermuda鈥檚 bustling coral reefs.

But ocean acidification is overall not a well-studied process. In large part, that鈥檚 due to the fact that present pH sensor technologies are too expensive or primitive to plumb the world鈥檚 highest latitudes, deep seas, and more coastal regions for details on just how and where the acidification is occurring.

鈥淥ur oceans are currently in the midst of a silent crisis,鈥� says the foundation, . 鈥淭o fully understand and adapt to the threat of ocean acidification, better pH sensing systems to monitor and collect ocean pH data are urgently needed.鈥�

The competition is offering two prize purses, each $1 million, but teams are eligible to win both. The first purse is the $1,000,000 Accuracy award, split into a $750,000 First Place and a $250,000 Second Place prize, which will be awarded to 鈥渢he teams produce the most accurate, stable and precise pH sensors under a variety of tests.鈥�

The second purse, also split into first and second prize, is the Affordability award, given to 鈥渢he teams that produce the least expensive, easy-to-use, accurate, stable, and precise pH sensors under a variety of tests.鈥�

Registration for the competition will be open from January 1聽to June 1. The full event will include lab trials in San Francisco, coastal trials in Seattle, and sea trials in Hawaii. It is expected to wrap up in May 2015.

X Prize has several other active prizes, including the to send a robot to the moon and the aimed at engineering a mobile healthcare device.

In August, the foundation for the first time ever , the Archon Genomics XPRIZE. Initiated in 2006, the prize promised $10 million to the first team able to sequence 100 whole human genomes at a cost of $10,000 or less per genome. Just seven years later, after an unprecedented revolution in the speed and cost of genomic sequencing, and with private companies charging less than $5,000 per genome, the competition鈥檚 goal was moot.