Monitoring climate change through sensors in surfboards

‘I’m a person who likes to surf… I’m, uh, hesitant or reluctant to take the title of surfer,’ explains Phil Bresnahan. ‘Most people who really call themselves surfers are out there, you know, almost every single day of the week and often for three, four hours at a time. I’m really a hobbyist compared to that.’

There are few people who spend more time on and in the ocean than surfers, placing them in an ideal position to expand our knowledge of this unique environment. Bresnahan is a research engineer for the Smartfin Project, which aims to capitalise on the connection between surfers and their second home by incorporating sensors into surfboards to collect crucial data from our warming seas.

Bresnahan – who has just moved from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US to take up a professorship at the University of North Carolina Wilmington – studied chemical engineering as an undergraduate and chemistry for his PhD before shifting to the field of oceanography. This switch was driven by concerns about climate change and ocean acidification and an urge to share research beyond traditional scientific contexts.

‘I realised a couple of years into grad school that there was so much more happening than just research and publications’, he explains. ‘It seems almost silly to say it now, but it became clearer and clearer that I needed to have more of a connection with the community.’