Winnie Biwott, John Godbey, Alex Pfiffner
Ocean Acidification (OA) describes the uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide into the ocean’s waters, which ultimately lowers the ocean pH. While many individuals throughout the world are becoming more aware of the effects of climate change, many more have never heard of OA or the challenging problems it presents. This project seeks to determine whether a correlation between socioeconomic and demographic factors and ocean acidification awareness (OAA) exists. Using Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a survey will be administered to thousands of individuals all over the world with the hope of achieving a statistically significant quantity of data. Parsing the data could identify a correlation between factors such as education, ethnicity, or location and OAA. Education, and location by extension, will likely contribute more to OAA than ethnicity, wealth, religion, and other less influential factors. With a large enough sample size, underlying trends may begin to precipitate and will suggest the overall relationships between OAA and demographics.