The COVID-19 pandemic offered an unprecedented opportunity to look at changes in the Earth system in response to reduced human activity. Your challenge is to develop tools to better understand changes in the interconnected Earth system as seen through the EO Dashboard.
The main reason that made the problems in water quality and leads it to decrease is increasing in the percentage of phytoplankton all over the world's seas and oceans.our project works on removing the extra percentage of phytoplankton by killing it and stop its growth by using titanium dioxide nanoparticles and spreading these nanoparticles on the excess of the phytoplankton to make the water quality in seas and oceans return to its normal.
we have developed a new way to keep the water clean to maintain the environmental balance, especially in the time of Covid-19 and the changes that affected the water of the ocean by increasing the amount of phytoplankton in water so it can damage the food web and cause great damage in the environment, and so we have developed a new way of killing the excessive amount of phytoplankton and maintain the balance of the environment.
As we all know seas and oceans are important for us. The Ocean is the heart of the planet. Water covers more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Sea plants, like Posidonia, produce 70% of the oxygen we breathe and the deep waters are home to wildlife and some of the biggest creatures on earth. It provides us with food, jobs, life, entertainment, and sailing!.
There are other reasons that make oceans and seas important.
So, our project is important because it can solve the water quality problems that happened because of the pandemic and lack of human activity and we have noticed that the common problem is the increase of the phytoplankton in seas and oceans without removing it which happened due to cessation of human activity.
We are going to spread an amount of Titanium Dioxide nanoparticles by helicopter above the ocean or the sea especially on the parts that have a lot of phytoplankton in them.
The project works on killing the excess of phytoplankton chlorophyll-a in the seas and oceans by using Titanium Dioxide nanoparticles.
Damage to plankton occurs when titanium dioxide is electronically excited due to energy from UV light. Electrons from the nanoparticle react with surrounding water to form reactive oxygen species (ROS), which are very potent oxidizers that damage cell membranes and degrade proteins and organic compounds within a cell and there is an experiment showing that even normal levels of ultraviolet light (UV) from sunshine are enough to cause titanium dioxide nanoparticles suspended in seawater to kill phytoplankton.
we hope to achieve bringing back the water quality of the seas and oceans to its normal quality before the pandemic problems.
what inspired us to choose this challenge that we hope to help with our research and our solution to solve the water quality problems all over the world, bring back the original water quality, save seas and oceans living creatures and we are interested and know a lot about Biochemistry.
So we chose this challenge because we are interested in water-related areas and we know how important water is.
we had a great approach to develop and achieve the best solution to our project, first of all, we used the chemical component titanium but we found that it would be toxic and instead of solving the problem we would complicate it by harming fish and so humans and all living organisms and the eco-balance, and after the research, we found that using titanium dioxide nanoparticles will be less toxicity and won't harm the environment and will get the desired goal without any side effects, and all of thas was our approach to get the highest efficiency of our project.
we have depended on software tools that helped us a lot to achieve the best and desired visualization as we have used sites that provided us with simulations of our project and these sites are mentioned in the "references section", some of them showed the Earth's surface and simulates the efficiency of our project.
We faced a lot of problems in searching for something that solves the problem easily, not toxic, safe for the seas and oceans water, and their living creatures, or even human people, but with a lot of research and by taking the common water quality problem all over the world we have been able to find a solution ( Titanium dioxide nanoparticles).
Space agency data has been used in our project as we have depended on the websites provided in the resources tab mentioned above, first of all, we knew more about the problem and the challenge of "Looking at the big picture" from the videos in the Bootcamp tab which has provided us with a great package of information to our challenge, also the EO dashboard has been used to influence us and provide with the needed information of the Earth on specific dates from the satellites that capture the images upon the Earth's surface, even though there isn't anything more important than the graphs associated in the dashboard of the water quality time series, all of that helped us to indicate the main problem that the Earth is facing which is the increase of phytoplankton in water that leads to the increase of chlorophyll-a that will make a great unbalance to the ecosystem, we also have used the information in the (Data resource guide) to go to the useful links and find the best solution by understanding the main problem.
The PowerPoint presentation slides of our solution
The Demo of our solution based on searching on the EO dashboard and our visualization.
We need to make an experiment to make sure that our work can be integrated into the Earth Observing Dashboard.
We are going to need two samples from the technical team to try our solution.
One of them is a sample from sea or ocean water that contains phytoplankton and the other one is titanium dioxide nanoparticles.
were going to try it and as soon as it works it will be ready to be integrated into the Dashboard.
Earth Observing Dashboard (eodashboard.org)
(it has provided us with the needed information about the challenge and the main problem).
UV excites nanoparticles to kill phytoplankton | Human World | EarthSky
(it has a great effect to find the best solution to the challenge).
(it helped us a lot to integrate the effect of air pollution with water pollution and take it into consideration).
(it was a great reference that influenced us with the most important information).
#BioChemistry #SavingEnvironment #Ocean #Phytoplankton #WaterQuality
This project has been submitted for consideration during the Judging process.