I remember when the Biosphere experiment was being done. I was always fascinated with it and wanted to see it. A whole lifetime has gone by since and I completetly forgot about it until I got to Tucson and saw tourist brochures on it. If I did nothing else in Tucson, I wanted to see the Biosphere. Being my usual putz-along self, I did not give myself enough time to see the Biosphere. I missed the 50-minute film on the making of the complex and had to rush around after the tour to see some of the exhibits.
Biosphere 2 is an awesome, awesome place. For those who don’t know what Biosphere is, it was an experiment done back in 1993-1994 to see what would happen if people/plants/animals were contained in a completely sealed environment. I haven’t confirmed a lot of the stuff I wrote below; I can only go by my memory of what I learned that day. The tour guide had a portable speaker system and many times, I had a difficult time hearing what he was saying.
The road from the main highway. Are we there yet? The rainforest:
The Biosphere had 11 people live in it for two years. All were scientists, biologists, botanists, geologists, etc. To give you an idea of how tightly sealed the Biosphere is, in two years it lost 10% of its atmosphere – compared to today’s International Space Station which loses 10% of its atmosphere every 24 hours. They sure don’t make things like they used to.
The main building where the crew lived:
This picture below was one of the garden rooms. It is currently empty. I took a picture of it because it reminded me of a scene in a movie and I wondered if any films were ever shot there. I cannot remember what the movie was, but there was a chase or a fight on the balcony (where I am standing to snap the picture). Perhaps it was a James Bond-type movie I am thinking of. Anyway, the next project for this room is to bring in lava and experiment on what plants will grow in it, how deep the soil needs to be, and how much water will be needed (compared to normal dirt). The lava will be sloped or tiered so that they can also determine at what height the plants will grow to their optimum ability.
The kitchen. The decor ain't my style, but I wouldn't mind having one this large, bright, and clean:
The kitchen. The decor ain't my style, but I wouldn't mind having one this large, bright, and clean:
The dining room and where we met to start our tour:
At the end of the two years, there was much controversy that the experiment failed. The media ripped the experiment to shreds, making the general public think it was a failure. It was NOT a failure; it was an experiment wherein their questions were answered. Unfortunately, the answers were not always positive results. They determined that you cannot seal plants and humans in a contained environment.
A view of the mountains from within the sphere:
A fused plant, determined to be the only one in the world. The plant formed two trunks, each branching off and fusing together:
The main issue that caused negative impact was the lack of ultraviolet light. The biosphere is made of layers of glass with a polyethylene sheet or coating. It was the polyethylene that blocked out the ultraviolet light. They brought bees in to pollinate the plants and discovered that because the bees rely on ultraviolet light to find their food source, they were not pollinating the flowers because they couldn’t find them. The humans ended up manually pollinating the plants themselves.
Because the Biosphere was sealed, it also got extremely hot – think of how hot your car gets after sitting in the sun all day with the sun beaming down through the windshield. Being in the desert, the Biosphere got up to 150 degrees at times with nowhere for the heat to escape.
A third problem was the cement. All of the rocks within the Biosphere were man made of cement. Cement has a curing time of anywhere from two to ten years. They did not give the cement time to cure, hence, it cured while sealed within the sphere. The curing process contributed to sucking the atmosphere of either Oxygen or CO2 (reference was deleted from Wikipedia – whatever the result, either people and animals needed oxygen or plants needed CO2 and the curing cement absorbed much of what was needed by others).
They had a humungous salt water tank that they called “the ocean,” built with coral reefs and wave machines to simulate waves and tides. The ocean started out stocked with fish and again, because of the lack of ultraviolet light, the algae grew and smothered the fish’ source of oxygen. They started out with a beautiful beach with sand that was brought in from Bermuda and other coastal areas. One of the few mechanical failures they had was that the wave machine went nuts and caused a tsunami, washing all the sand down into the ocean tank.
The ocean:
Air and water were all recycled. The Biosphere breathes by two huge “lungs” that pushes the air in and out of the main building. The lung took 12 hours to expand, which sucked out the old air and then another 12 hours to contract which pushed in clean air. We stood inside one of the lungs and you couldn’t tell anything was happening. All we experienced was a vast echo. When we walked out of the building, though, we were thrown into a blast of wind that felt like a 50-mph storm.
One of the tunnels going down to the lung:
Two pictures within the lung. It is on it's way down, pushing air out, through the tunnel (above) and into the biosphere:
The Biosphere project was started again after the first two-year stint, but was shut down after six months. The building since then, and continues now, as the research facility it was originally intended to be. They still research plant growth and water conservation. The next big project is to grow vegetation in different levels of tiered lava “soil” to determine height and water needs for optimum growth.
Also, the Biosphere is no longer sealed. They now have vents to allow the summer heat to escape. Occasionally birds, lizards, and snakes find their way into the Biosphere, and, of course, now humans walk in and out of the building on a daily basis. During the experiment, the building’s energy came mainly from gasoline generators with diesel as back-up. They are now installing solar panels and have about 2/3 of those needed to sustain the power requirements. I was very surprised to hear that they used generators during the initial experiment and not rely on solar and/or wind power. The lungs alone probably could have regenerated its own power. Perhaps the technology just wasn’t available for the amount of power that was needed. I should have asked that question.
More outside pictures: The moon over the rainforest:
This is a picture of the Lemmon Mountains: The furthest south you can go in the United States to ski and snowboard.
Mr. Ed Bass' home (small red building to the right). Mr. Bass was the chief financier of the Biosphere 2 project:
