Engineers Pioneer Way to Identify Pollution in South African Seas

A team at the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Department of Electrical Engineering will soon undertake Project SMARTPOL, a new venture that will identify sources of pollution in South Africa ocean waters through methods never seen before.

Project SMARTPOL, a shorter name for a project called "Autonomous network system with specialised and integrated multi-sensor technology for dynamic monitoring of marine pollution", is a three-year project that was granted funding by the MarTERA ERA-NET Cofund scheme of the European Commission.

Oil and plastic pollution are top of the list of what Professor Amit Kumar Mishra is expecting they will find; and with the ever-increasing presence of micro-plastic in nature, they have had to come up with new ways of monitoring this microscopic pollutant. "Oil spills are one of the major forms of ocean pollution and ships release oil and no one is monitoring this. Plastic in the ocean tends to cluster; one of our hopes is to catch these with satellites," Mishra said.