Skip to footer

Can $7 million XPrize shift focus from 'sexy sciences' to Earth's oceans?

Oceans account for 70 percent of the home planet's surface, but reliable maps exist for only 7 percent of the ocean floor. XPrize and Shell are offering up $7 million to change that.

|
Yuriko Nakao/Reuters/File
Yasuhiro Kato, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Tokyo, displays a mud sample extracted from the depths of about 13,123 ft. below the Pacific ocean surface, July 5, 2011. XPrize announced a competition Monday to better explore and the ocean floor.

The XPrize Foundation is offering up $7 million in hopes of enticing mankind's interest away from the stars for a moment and down toward the Earth's largest natural resource – the ocean.

The educational organization's newest competition seeks to counter the research slump that ocean study suffers when public interest and funding leans in favor of space and other "sexy science" fields.

“We know more about the surface of Mars than we do our own oceans,” XPrize chairman and chief executive Peter Diamandis said at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, according to Discovery News.

The three-year competition launched Monday invites scientists the world over to study the ocean floor. The Ocean Discovery XPrize offers $7 million to the team that develops the toughest robots capable of exploring the ocean floor 2.5 miles below the water's surface. The robotic vehicles must use high-resolution photos to identify and map features of geologic, archaeological, and biological import.

The teams will be judged on both their vehicles' ability to navigate the depths autonomously and the quality of the underwater photos.

The national preference for stargazing over scuba-sleuthing can be seen in a quick follow-the-money exercise, as Jessica Mendoza previously reported for The Christian Science Monitor:

A big part of the problem is that oceanography just doesn’t seem as sexy as, say, space exploration. To break it down in numbers: In 2013, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA, which runs ocean research as well as climate forecasting, fishery management, and others, received a little over $23 million in government funding for its exploration program, according to a report by the Center for American Progress. NASA’s exploration budget for that year, on the other hand, was about $3.8 billion, the same report found.

The money shows, as maps for the moon and Mars are more extensive than maps of the ocean floor, wrote Andrew Kornblatt for National Geographic. Oceans account for 70 percent of the home planet's surface, but reliable maps exist for only 7 percent of the ocean floor.

The competition sponsored by Shell and XPrize, a foundation that hosts competitions to improve the lot of mankind, aims to decrease that gap by focusing directly on mapping the ocean floor.

"Collectively, Shell, NOAA and XPRIZE are all aligned in our goals, which is really the discovery of what is down there, what’s in the deep ocean,” said Senior Director and XPrize Lead Dr. Jyotika Virmani according to National Geographic. “We want to help spur unparalleled ocean exploration through innovation and radical breakthroughs to find all the different wonders in the deep sea."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Can $7 million XPrize shift focus from 'sexy sciences' to Earth's oceans?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2015/1215/Can-7-million-XPrize-shift-focus-from-sexy-sciences-to-Earth-s-oceans
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe