24-Hour Ocean Acidification Hackathon

I almost left at 6pm. I had a long day ahead the next morning and thought I'd put in a few hours and call it.

I didn't leave. I got so absorbed in the problem that I stayed well past midnight, though not as late as my teammates Bianca and Shreya, who pushed through until 4am.

The problem we were given:

Rising CO2 is causing ocean acidification. The global ocean pH has dropped from 8.11 in 1985 to 8.05 in 2021. In Alaska, where colder water absorbs more CO2, it's already at 8.01. This damages the shells of oysters, clams, and other marine life — and since Alaska supplies over 60% of US seafood, the downstream effects on human health are real.

Our solution: build enclosed ocean environments engineered for phytoplankton to thrive. Phytoplankton absorb CO2 through photosynthesis at massive scale, and doing this in a controlled enclosure means the uptake can be managed, measured, and optimized without releasing genetically modified organisms into open water.

The hackathon taught me two things I use now. First: time management under genuine pressure is different from time management in theory. When you have 24 hours and a real problem, you have to triage constantly. Second: Root Cause Analysis. Rather than optimizing a solution to the surface problem, going one level deeper almost always reveals a better intervention point.