One of the most pressing climate change issues today is the rapid acidification of our world's oceans, and scientists have been working to better document just how quickly the problem is escalating. A new technology showcased at the awards ceremony for the latest XPrize competition Monday will allow scientists to measure the ocean's pH levels with unprecedented accuracy, giving us a better grasp of the problem and a better chance for solutions.

XPrize is a nonprofit that incentivizes innovation through public science competitions with big cash prizes, promoting new technology in everything from space travel to oil spill cleanup over the years. This competition, called the Wendy Schmidt Ocean Health XPrize, launched in 2012 and targeted an affordable solution for accurately measuring ocean acidity.

XPrize consulted leading experts at agencies like NOAA and found the inability to measure ocean acidification was one of the most pressing issues for ocean conservation. Chris Kellogg, a marine and microbiologist who helped judge the competition, said pH sensor technology that more accurately measures ocean acidification is key to understanding what is going wrong, and lab testing alone doesn't paint a full picture.

"You can measure pH really accurately in a laboratory, but the problem is you need to know what is going on in the ocean," she said. "When you collect a sample of water from the ocean and bring it to the lab, it's still changing, so when you measure it in the lab, it's not what is happening in the ocean."

For the past two years, 70 teams entered the competition, including 18 that actually created hardware and five that made it to the three-month test in controlled laboratory conditions at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and then a month-long performance test in a coastal environment at the Seattle Aquarium. The final challenge was a six-day deep-sea testing phase that gauged each device for accuracy and precision to 3,000 meters depth in the Pacific Ocean.