Hi! My name is Mikayla, I am 15 and from Australia.
I have always had an intrinsic appreciation of the water, and watersports have always been a passion: canoeing, paddleboarding, and surfing. Most of my childhood has been comprised of open-water swimming events around Sydney. The deterioration of these waterways as a result of toxic cyanobacteria blooms was something I found very alarming.
I often participate in our national cleanup Australia Day campaign as well as various local beach and wetland cleanups, as the issue of water preservation is very important to me and something I am vehement about. This first-hand immersion coupled with my love of science and curiosity has led me to conduct my research into cyanobacteria blooms.
Tell us what the water concern in your country is!
The dry landscape alongside worsening climate change contributes to Australia's water scarcity. Water is a valuable commodity for Australian agriculture, an essential industry for international trade. However, the eutrophicated conditions which typically arise in this setting are conducive to cyanobacteria blooms diminishing the ability to source an already scarce resource.
SolarCyanoSlayer
My project involves research into the causes of toxic cyanobacteria blooms and the development of a system which mitigates the risk. Cyanobacteria blooms plague global waterways and seriously impact the health of aquatic organisms, terrestrial animals, and humans. This threat is growing in prevalence alongside climate change and thus I aimed to design a system which prevents uncontrolled cyanobacteria reproduction (a bloom event), whilst allowing natural populations to exist. The design, the SolarCyanoSlayer, is also aimed to be self-sustaining for long-term implementation and constructed of biologically derived and recycled materials, reducing the embodied energy of construction. When placed in simulated eutrophic conditions the invention was demonstrated to be highly effective in countering cyanobacteria blooms and subsequently improving overall water quality.
