New X Prize Challenge: Map Ocean Floor

The ocean floor. — (Image credit: Albund/Shutterstock.com)

Attention, sea-loving explorers: There's a $7 million reason to get serious about your passion for ocean research right now.

Yesterday (Dec. 14), Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of X Prize, announced the launch of the Shell Ocean Discovery X Prize, a three-year global competition that challenges researchers to build better technologies for mapping what Diamandis called one of the "greatest unexplored frontiers" — Earth's seafloor.

“Our oceans cover two-thirds of our planet’s surface and are a crucial global source of food, energy, economic security and even the air we breathe, yet 95 percent of the deep sea remains a mystery to us,” Diamandis said yesterday at a keynote address during the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Right now, researchers have better maps of Mars than they do of Earth's seafloor, he added. [Photo Timeline: How the Earth Formed]

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To win the Ocean Discovery X Prize, researchers will need to develop an autonomous, relatively fast-moving vehicle that can be launched from the air or shoreline. The vehicle must be equipped with technologies that allow it to create high-resolution maps of the seafloor at depths of about 13,125 feet (4,000 meters). Throughout the competition, the underwater vehicles will also be tasked with creating high-res images of individual objects, including archeological, biological or geological features of the seafloor.

The teams that enter the competition won't just be competing for a chance to map the world's oceans; they'll also be going after some significant cash prizes. The winning team will take home $4 million, and whoever comes in second place will win $1 million. Additional monetary prizes will be awarded to the top 10 teams in the competition, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is offering a $1 million bonus prize to teams that demonstrate technology that uses biological and chemical signals to "sniff out" objects in the ocean.

The Shell Ocean Discovery X Prize is just one part of the X Prize Ocean Initiative, a series of five competitions that will span a 10-year period. Millions of dollars in prizes will be awarded to those who help X Prize reach its goal of addressing critical ocean challenges by 2020. In 2011, X Prize awarded the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge prize to a manufacturing team from the United States that developed technology for quickly cleaning up oil spills. And in July 2015, the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize was awarded to another U.S. team for its development of ocean sensors that improve scientific understanding of how carbon dioxide emissions are affecting ocean acidification.

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