The ocean puts food on our plates, provides up to 50% of the oxygen we breathe, and regulates the climate. But we ourselves are putting these huge bodies of water on the planet in danger.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even if greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced and global warming was limited to less than 2 ° C, sea levels could still rise 30 to 60 cm by 2100. Not counting that a third of marine mammals are in danger of extinction and our oceans are, thanks to our carbon emissions, 30% more acidic since pre-industrial times.
How to change things? There is a wide range of ideas to save our oceans. As a sample, a button:
Marine drones that roam the ocean collecting data
Saildrone’s 7-meter long autonomous vessels can sail continuously for up to a year on solar and wind power alone, transporting state-of-the-art ocean sensors in the parts of our ocean that we know least and unlocking new information. There are already more than twenty of them in the sea and the network is growing, focusing, for example, on finding out why great white sharks visit the “white shark cafe” in the Pacific – a resting place for white sharks. – and how climate change is affecting the North Atlantic.
Ocean cleaning systems
Dutch scientists created a huge floating device to clean an island of garbage in the Pacific Ocean . The 600-meter-long floating barrier has captured and held debris from what is known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Taking into account that each year between 600,000 and 800,000 metric tons of fishing utensils are abandoned or lost at sea and more than 8 million tons of plastic waste flow from the beaches … a device of this type is really necessary in our days. This vast cleaning system is designed not only to collect discarded fishing nets and large visible plastic objects, but also microplastics. The plastic barrier that floats on the surface of the sea has a three meter deep screen aimed at catching pieces of plastic without disturbing the marine life below. The device is equipped with transmitters and sensors so that it can communicate its position via satellites to a ship that will collect the garbage collected every few months.
A machine that traps plastic before it reaches the ocean
While several projects focus on removing plastics from the seas, the technology company Ichthion is developing a system to extract plastic waste from rivers, as these play a very important role in sweeping tons of waste from the land to the sea. The device in question sits on the surface of a river and diverts floating objects to the banks of the river, where a conveyor belt lifts them and passes them through a chamber. An artificial intelligence algorithm then recognizes the shapes and colors of different brands of plastics and packaging, allowing researchers to determine where the garbage comes from and which types of plastics are the most common.
These are some of the examples that we can find in which technology is at the service of our oceans. But there are many, many more. Initiatives multiply as the situation is becoming increasingly worrying. Let’s save the oceans!
