November 2024 Edition
A monthly round-up of news and trends important to the AltaSea community.
AltaSea Community Spotlight
As we celebrate our 10th anniversary—it is a spectacular moment for AltaSea! Thanks to the passionate support and enthusiasm of good friends like you, we have moved quickly to build a solid platform for testing and scaling Blue Economy technologies.
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We’re thrilled to announce that our Executive Vice President and COO, Jenny Krusoe, has been recognized as one of the Top 500 Female Founders by The Ocean Opportunity Lab in North America with over 100 countries represented!
Her vision and dedication continue to drive our mission forward, making a lasting impact not only within our company but across our community and beyond.
Congratulations Jenny, and all the other amazing founders recognized on that list!
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It was amazing to be part of creating and distributing marketing materials for Blue Hour 2024: Ocean Songs and seeing my words used on social media, in our emails and to describe the prizes in the Ocean Songs Auction. I could see how impactful my work was and got immediate gratification seeing it on our website and social pages.
I’ve long believed the way we communicate our stories matters, and that is especially true at a place as diverse and multifaceted as AltaSea.
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Earth is a “system in peril” approaching “dangerous, irreversible tipping points driven by nature loss and climate change.” These are the findings of the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) Living Planet Report, published in October 2024.
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As a new academic year gets underway at Caltech, part of the excitement on campus centers around the opening of the Institute’s newest building: the Resnick Sustainability Center (RSC), which has been five years in the making. Located on the western edge of campus along Wilson Avenue, the striking four-story building will serve as a defining component of a major sustainability thrust at Caltech and strives to do something truly unique—to bring the entire campus together to address the warming planet’s most pressing problems related to energy and resource utilization.
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Sperra, a company dedicated to pioneering the next generation of renewable energy solutions through automated construction, has been awarded a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office to advance innovation in pumped storage hydropower technologies. In this project, Sperra will design, fabricate, and test a 10-m diameter, 500 kW / 600 kWh energy storage unit off the coast of Southern California.
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In the world of cleantech, the journey from lab innovation to real-world application is crucial. The greatest single challenge with scaling any new technology is making the leap from the development phase to mainstream commercial viability. Captura understands this challenge and is taking bold steps to bridge the gap. In an exciting move to fast-track the commercialization of our Direct Ocean Capture (DOC) technology, Captura is advancing our research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) efforts in Los Angeles and Hawaii. This expansion aims to accelerate the completion of our piloting program and ready our technology for deployment in large-scale commercial plants.
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This collaboration is a significant step forward for both organizations toward advancing oceanographic research that supports the goals of the Partnership for Atlantic Cooperation (Atlantic Partnership), a coalition of 42 countries committed to maintaining a healthy and sustainable Atlantic Ocean and developing a new generation of ocean scientists.
Jade Clemons, the Director of Workforce and Economic Development, of AltaSea also attended the tour with OceanX.
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Marine Science
The Azores, an autonomous Portuguese archipelago, has approved legislation to create the largest marine protected area network in the North Atlantic Ocean.
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While scientists are reluctant to say any single extreme event was caused by climate change, researchers have been quick to point out the role that rising temperatures have had in making the Spanish floods worse.
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Twenty-six days at sea; more than 49,000 square kilometers (18,919 square miles) of seafloor mapped; 5,579 linear nautical miles (6,420 linear miles) traversed… and 13,580 linked double crochet stitches stitched.
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Healthy coral reefs echo with a chorus of grunts and purrs from fish feeding, looking for mates, or defending their territories, underscored by the persistent crackling of snapping shrimp. Larval corals use these sounds as cues to decide where to choose a home. The researchers found that now a second species of coral larvae responded to the sounds of a healthy reef played through a speaker, indicating ‘acoustic enrichment’ encourages coral to settle has the potential to be a widely applicable method among coral species for reef restoration.
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Sustainable and Innovative Business
The economic future likely lies in the waves of the ocean. The sea continues to be the source of several profitable opportunities, including tourism and energy. However, the ocean and its accompanying blue economy are actively being threatened by climate change, and problems will only worsen without proper government efforts. The ocean may also be key to turning the climate crisis around, if proper conservation practices are implemented.
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Private funding to domestically produce electric vehicles and clean energy equipment is largely flowing to “disadvantaged” census tracts, a new analysis shows. The results vary widely by state.
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Mycologists believe the solution to some of our biggest pollution issues is under our feet. Humble fungi are now being used as meat alternatives, eco-friendly leather and to help break down waste such as plastics. While a new industry, the market for mycelium, the root-like structure of fungi, is forecast to reach $6.5 billion by 2032. Now nascent startups are using it to help curb pollution from the seafood industry.
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More than 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by ocean. But more than 80 percent of that marine realm is unknown. A crew aboard one of the world’s most advanced research vessels is exploring some of that uncharted water — and you can go along for the adventure.
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Education
Whoever ends up in the White House after next week’s presidential election will face a suite of crises related to the unchecked production of plastics: toxic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing facilities, chemicals leaching from the 20 million metric tons of plastic that wind up in the environment every year, and microplastic contamination throughout people’s bodies, just to name a few.
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Leaders in ocean science and sustainability from Stanford University, SRI, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium gathered in the heart of Silicon Valley to discuss how technology can help illuminate and protect Earth’s largest and least understood habitat.
“The ocean holds 97% of the volume where life can exist, and it needs our attention,” said Julie Packard, co-founder and executive director of the Monterey Bay Aquarium, during a keynote address to an auditorium of 250 attendees and 100 online viewers.
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Oceans are vital to sustaining life on Earth, as they produce over half of the oxygen we breathe and play a crucial role in regulating the planet’s climate. They also support a diverse array of marine ecosystems that provide food, livelihoods and recreational opportunities for millions of people worldwide.