It is not just taking care of the ocean, but taking care of our home.

In recent weeks, oil slicks have appeared on the Brazilian coast and reached about 187 beaches in the Northeast. These oil slicks, in addition to affecting so many marine lives - as well as terrestrial ones - also impacted the region's tourism activities, taking away the source of income for many families.

What does this show us? That the ocean is our home and it seems we have not yet realized that water damage can change our life on land.

How to take care if we are not seeing what happens?

Today, there is no transparent Big Data about what happens on the high seas - it involves oil spills and dumping garbage in the oceans - so it is not possible to quickly remedy ALL accidents, nor to find out the causes or guilty.

What does the project solve?

Detect and report on oil slicks in the sea before they reach critical points in coastal regions, enabling preventive measures to be taken to reduce impacts and, in the future, to be able to locate the sources of this material based on the collected data.

The current technology used, starts from the spots of arrival of the spots on the beaches and makes the reverse path, estimating where the leak began. This technology is not able to act as a solving agent for this problem, because it is not yet possible to predict oil stains and other tailings before the beaches are contaminated.

In this sense, the project aims to provide a way to generate data on oil speckled spots in the ocean, even in areas that, due to a political bias, cannot be directly monitored by any country.

Engineer Luiz Landau, who coordinates Coope's Laboratory of Computational Methods in Engineering, explained that current technology is only an estimate, that is, it is still necessary to create a tool capable of providing not only accurate information, as well as follow up on these spots before they cause major damage.

How to solve?

The project aims to develop a low cost IoT device, coupled with infrared sensors capable of detecting oil slicks, collecting and distributing data on the quality of water and substances present in the region where the vessel is located. This data will also contain GPS and collection time information.

These devices will be installed on fishing vessels, as they are most interested in keeping the waters, which are their main source of income, free of contamination.

With data stored in the form of big data, we will be able to perform analysis based on this collected information, cross-referencing NASA data, weather forecast data, and tidal movement data to predict potential contamination targets. .

What were the biggest challenges for the team?

Our biggest difficulty was how to make such an ambitious project feasible and possible, but we managed to get around this with the help of resources already available, including NASA itself. Finally, after much feedback and research, we were able to fulfill the proposal and solve several problems at once, as our idea is not only about oil stains, it is also applicable to plastics and other miscellaneous wastes.