Legacy of Biosphere 2 lasts long after the original group has left the speaker

ORACLE, AZ – They lived two years and 20 minutes under the glass of a miniature Earth, with an ocean, a virgin forest, a desert, meadows and mangroves. Their air and water were recycled and they grew the sweet potatoes, rice and other foods they needed to survive.

About 1500 people were invited and about 200 journalists were present while the first eight inhabitants of Biosphere 2 had left their glass terrarium a quarter of a century ago in two groups who no longer spoke in the stress of sharing from a small space and disputes over how the project should be executed. Critics have described the experience of 150 million dollars of failure because additional oxygen was injected into what was supposed to be an autonomous system.

A power struggle in the ensuing months led the funder, Texan billionaire Edward Bass, to hire investment banker Stephen Bannon, future chief strategist of President Trump, to bring the project back to l & # 39; abandonment.

Today, Biosphere 2 is a different place, a site of the University of Arizona where researchers from all over the world can study everything from the effects of ocean acidification on coral to ways of ensuring food safety.

"It started as a very great societal experience and was transformed by sheer ingenuity into something that has proven useful," said Jeffrey Dukes, director of the Perdue Climate Change Research Center. "It's also a really nice facility to visit."

Joaquin Ruiz, a geologist who leads the project in the Sonoran Desert, about 30 km northeast of Tucson, said the controlled environments of Biosphere 2 allow researchers to conduct novel experiments "because you do not want live in unexpected circumstances. "

This means that researchers at the World Water Safety Institute at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, do not have to worry about damaging the environment when they study how the tiny rainforest adapt their water consumption.

The miniature ocean is being renovated to allow researchers from the University of Hawaii to continue their experiments on a tiny reef without harming the Pacific reefs. A $ 550,000 grant from Johns Hopkins University is helping scientists test theories of water movement on three artificial slopes called the Landscape Evolution Observatory, a gigantic earth sciences laboratory.

The university took over the management of Biosphere 2 in mid-2007 and in June 2011, it announced the full acquisition of the glazed area of ​​3 hectares, with a maximum height of 75 feet in certain places, as well as surrounding buildings and grounds.

Just as Dukes, Christopher Field, independent ecologist, director of the Stanford Woods Environmental Institute, said that Biosphere 2 has been shown to be useful for science in its current evolution.

"You have to separate it from what it was originally seeing its value today," Field said, adding that controlled environment facilities such as Biosphere 2 "provide a powerful way to help us understand how the world works ".

"It's an important part of our portfolio to understand climate change," he said.

Biologist John Adams, deputy director of Biosphere 2, has been involved in this project since 1995, when he graduated from the University of Arizona. "This project has always been bold and ambitious," he said.

Adams said 55 people are now working on the site, including 30 researchers. Bass donated $ 30 million to Biosphere 2 last year and sits on its advisory board.

"They did a really great job in laying a solid foundation for their science," said Jane Poynter, one of eight original inhabitants of Biosphere 2, about current research. "Twenty-five years after our publication, we are still very much looking to the future."

Poynter said that since she and the other "Biospheres" have emerged from the greenhouse, much of the initial animosity has faded.