The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024–2025
Aqua Glow pipes sunlight under algal blooms to bring oxygen back to dead zones
Lenses and fiber optics pipe sunlight beneath algal blooms, restarting photosynthesis and oxygen in dead zones with no external energy.
Jinhak Lee · Sinae Song · Kiwook Rha
What it had to solve
Algal blooms cover the water's surface and block the sunlight that underwater plants need, so photosynthesis stops and oxygen-starved dead zones form. The project set out to restore those zones by giving the ecosystem back its light.
How it works
Algal blooms can blanket water and cut off the sunlight that underwater plants need, so photosynthesis stops and oxygen-starved dead zones form. Aqua Glow started from a simple inversion: instead of removing the bloom, bring the ecosystem the one thing it is missing — light.
The design captures sunlight with AGILE lens technology and carries it underwater through fiber optics at over 90% efficiency, with no external energy. The structure is 100% bio-based, modular and buoyant, so units can float where blooms block the surface and adapt to the site.
In a seven-day test in a dark room, the team reports oxygen levels increased by 242.86%, evidence that delivered sunlight can restart photosynthesis and re-oxygenate the water. The work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive, listed under Future Impact.
Why it lands
- Delivering sunlight around the bloom works with the ecosystem's own machinery instead of adding energy or moving equipment.
- Fiber optics and a concentrating lens move light at over 90% efficiency, so the device needs no external power source.
- A bio-based, modular, buoyant form lets units float into place and scale with the size of the dead zone.
- The seven-day dark-room test gives an early quantified signal — oxygen up 242.86% — that the mechanism actually works.
What it did
In the seven-day dark-room test the device raised oxygen levels by 242.86%, evidence that delivered sunlight can re-oxygenate oxygen-starved water. The work is preserved in the D&AD awards archive, listed under Future Impact.
What you can take
When pollution blocks the thing an ecosystem needs, the cheapest intervention can be delivering that missing input around the blockage — here, sunlight — instead of fighting the bloom.
Since then
Aqua Glow is preserved in the D&AD awards archive with Jinhak Lee, Sinae Song and Kiwook Rha credited as entrants under the Future Impact listing. The entry records no deployment beyond the research-phase test, so the case stands on the concept, the mechanism and the reported laboratory result.
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