 I really don't give the ocean much thought when I was growing up. We'd take an occasional vacation to the ocean and all the big waves and the salty water and all that. It was kind of fun, but I never really had a close affinity for the ocean. It just wasn't a topic. My earliest memories are playing in the ocean in the water. I went to sea as a commercial fisherman at age 13. Fished salmon in the Pacific Northwest for 10 years. I loved being on the ocean. Maybe I wasn't going to be the world's greatest salmon fisherman, and so I became a scientist instead. Team Durafat. Here in Minnesota, we're a long way from an ocean. But working with Ken, he got me introduced to the topic of ocean acidification. We're burning lots more carbon dioxide. It dissolves in the ocean where it reacts with water to form carbonic acid. Back in 1975, our thought was that with more CO2 in the ocean plants would grow more. The ocean would be a happier place. All the creatures that live in the ocean depend on the chemistry being what they're used to. They're a whole nation in the tropical Pacific where the entire country is built on coral. Their entire islands are dissolving away. If we really want to know what's going on in the ocean, we have to be able to measure the pH. The Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health X Prize is a competition to find this pH sensor that oceanographers need. That would be what any scientist would want. Here's my data. It's very convincing. Let me show it to you and you will know how to react to it. The X Prize was perfect. We had a clear objective. We had a timeline. It helped really pull everything together. Perfect. Thank you, Team Durafat. Team Durafat is a conglomeration of three institutions. Honeywell that developed the Durafat chip, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and those of us working at MBARI. We had the advantage that we had been working on a pH sensor before the X Prize competition came along. We came upon the Honeywell Durafat. A wonderful device. Found that it worked extremely well. It was super accurate and it worked so well. We needed to develop a whole new system of thermodynamics to calibrate it. But it wasn't packaged to run in the ocean. We partnered up with Bob Hughes, the man that makes the Durafat devices, and it was like a marriage made in heaven. It's really been a lot of fun to teach them about the ocean and to learn from them about the technology they know. So we come in as oceanographers and we're learning about silicon devices and fabrication of transistors. We've been working on this for 40 years and it's really taken that long to really find a device that really works. The most rewarding part is when you see something that you've done and you've put hard work into, become successful. Now it's making a difference in the world. The beauty of the X Prize is we don't win. There's going to be an even better one. We're going to equip the next generation. It's going to totally change the way oceanography gets done.