In what seems like an unlikely twist of events, a team from Montana was crowned the winner of the $2M Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPRIZE, a global competition to incentivize innovation in ocean chemistry technology, at last night’s awards ceremony in New York City. Sunburst Sensors, a small company of chemists and engineers from Missoula, Montana won the $750,000 grand prize in both the affordability and accuracy categories, earning them a total of $1.5M.
“Who would have imagined when we set off on this journey two years ago that the winner would have come from Missoula, Montana?” says Wendy Schmidt, prize sponsor and president of The Schmidt Family Foundation. But that’s the beauty of these competitions, she says: winners and innovators can come from anywhere, and there are people who don’t live on the ocean but care about its health.
Schmidt partnered with XPRIZE in 2012 to design a competition that would spark the creation of new pH sensors to affordably, accurately and efficiently measure ocean chemistry in both shallow and deep water. Increasing carbon emissions have changed the basic chemistry of the ocean—about ten times faster than any other time in the past 50 million years. As some of the carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean, a series of chemical reactions occur that make the ocean more acidic and reduce the availability of minerals that are critical to shell-building organisms such as oysters and corals. Although this phenomenon—called ocean acidification—is well known in temperate latitudes, little is known about the changes occurring in high latitudes, coastal regions, and the deep sea. By incentivizing the creation of new sensors for these environments, scientists will be better able to collect data on ocean acidification, which in turn will help inform policy.
The challenge launched in September 2013 with 24 teams, which had to go through 4 rigorous phases: innovation phase, lab trials, coastal trials and ocean trials. After the initial innovation phase, teams had to put their sensors through a three-month test in controlled laboratory conditions at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Fourteen teams then advanced to a month-long performance test in a coastal environment at the Seattle Aquarium. The final five teams then went to Hawaii last month to compete in a six-day trial to see how their sensors performed in 3,000 meters of water.
The journey was a difficult one, with many failures and difficulties along the way. “I really did feel at one point that maybe no one would meet the high bar we'd set” says Paul Bunje, senior director of oceans at the XPRIZE Foundation. By the time the teams reached Hawaii, he said the competition had turned into a collaborative effort. “What they accomplished is nothing short of remarkable,” he says.
Sunburst Sensors had already been developing chemical sensors when Ocean Health XPRIZE was first announced, but the competition’s requirements were quite different from the sensors they were already producing. “Sampling that fast and sampling that deep is just something we hadn’t done,” says James Beck, CEO of Sunburst Sensors. The company reiterated upon their previously developed commercial sensors to create the two winning sensors: the i-SAMI (“i” for inexpensive) and the t-SAMI (“t” for titanium).
Being based in Montana posed some interesting challenges for Beck and his colleagues: with no ocean nearby, they had to bring back jugs of seawater from the coast. They also didn't have a body of water deeper than 500 feet or so to test their equipment in, which meant collaborating with a colleague at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute to test the one potential weakness on the t-SAMI.
“When I was there in Hawaii, I was sweating bullets every time [the t-SAMI] went down,” says Beck. Every time the device returned from the depths, he would go up to the device and listen for the pump ticking, to ensure that it was still working. “Luckily it didn’t come back full of water,” he says.
Sunburst Sensors beat out the four other finalists, which included representatives from much larger institutions such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. The win was a pleasant surprise for Beck: “I’m pretty much blown away by the fact that we won both.”
The second place prize in affordability was awarded to ANB Sensors from Cambridge, England, and the second place prize in accuracy was awarded to Team DuraFET from Plymouth, Minnesota and Monterey Bay, California. Each team won $250,000.
Although the competition may be over, its completion a new beginning for those involved. Beck says Sunburst Sensors plans to pursue the development of the inexpensive sensor they developed for the competition. “The real impact, the real change begins the day that a prize is won,” says Bunje.
