Our Background

We are pretty convinced that science has a key role in every area of knowledge, however, we consider to attack a life-time problematic, thus, we chose the NASA SPACE APPS CHALLENGE category “Living in our world” with the specific challenge, “To bloom or not to bloom”.

Algal organisms naturally live in great bodies of water, these are of fundamental importance to sustain the life in biomes, nonetheless, due to its excessive increment of population, it has carried several worrying issues. Especially, On the Caribbean coast, in the last years has been a sudden negative impact due to the overpopulation of Sargassum (Sargassum bacciferum), these overpopulated algal bodies are drastically affecting a large number of species in our world. In order to help to contra rest this problem, Zero Hour was born, a multidisciplinary team, formed by students of Physics, Computer Science, Chemical, Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, with the principal objective of analyzing the behavior of the environment where the Sargassum is born, in order to predict the formation of this life-risking problem in our oceans.

Some concepts

Sargassum is a Macroalgal bloom. It is a key part of the tropical and subtropical floral species. Also, it represents the home of several marine species. It is known that Sargassum is originated from an accumulation zone, which can be found near the coasts of Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and the Equatorial Atlantic. The reproduction of Sargassum is very accelerated due to warm currents of ocean water. Even though Sargassum bloom is a natural phenomenon, it is believed that its bloom has been accelerated in the last years due to the direct intervention of the humankind. The years of most quantity of registered bloom of Sargassum are 2011, 2015, 2018, 2019.

Our project:

https://github.com/FrydaOviedo/Zero-Hour