The legacy of Biosphere 2 is perpetuated more than a quarter of a century later

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 Texan funder Edward P. Bass to hire investment banker Stephen Bannon, who was later President Trump's chief strategist, to bring the project back into disarray. financial.

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 out as a very great societal experience and was transformed by sheer ingenuity into something else that has proven useful," said Jeffrey S. Dukes, director of the Center for Research on Cancer. climate change of Perdue. "It's also a really nice facility to visit."

Joaquin Ruiz, a geologist who runs the project in the Sonoran Desert about 48 km northeast of Tucson, said the controlled environments of Biosphere 2 allow researchers to conduct inimitable experiments "because you do not want to have unexpected conditions. "

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 small rain forest change their water consumption.

The miniature ocean is being renovated so that researchers from various locations, including the University of Hawaii, can continue their experiments on a miniature 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 ​​just over one hectare , reaching up to 23 meters in some places. buildings and grounds around him.

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.

The initial project was an idea of ​​the systems ecologist John Allen and Bass was a funder when the first group of four women and four men entered Biosphere 2 on September 26, 1991. Today, he is almost 90 years old and lives quietly in Santa Fe, New Mexico. .

A second group mission was completed early after Bass ousted Allen and other senior officials in April 1994 and temporarily appointed Bannon to the position of interim director during a conflict between leaders. . Bannon led the project for about two years, then Columbia University took over, transforming the once airtight structure into a "continuous flow" system and manipulating carbon dioxide levels to study global warming. planetary.

Poynter and Taber MacCallum then married and settled in Tucson, where they operate World View Enterprises, a pioneering venture into flying on the periphery of space with high altitude balloons. They met during the training for Biosphere 2 and their relationship flourished after they entered the compound.

The couple hopes that World View's high altitude remotely controlled balloons will be used for weather monitoring, communications and research at a cost well below the cost of satellites. They are also working on a gear called Voyager, which they want to use to take people to about 30,000 meters (30,000 meters) above the Earth.

Crew members Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo and Sarah Silverstone work with the Biosphere Foundation, which conducts marine research in Southeast Asia. Her fellow crew member Linda Leigh, a botanist lives near Biosphere 2 in Arizona. The crew's physician, Roy Walford, a renowned researcher on the effects of a low-calorie diet on longevity, died of Lou Gehrig's disease in 2004, at the age of 79.

The other member of the crew, Mark Nelson, lives in Santa Fe and recently published a book entitled "Pushing Our Limits: Insights from Biosphere 2".

In his book, Nelson describes the group's experiences and calls on people to reconnect with nature to reverse the trends that threaten the original biosphere, the Earth.

"I remain optimistic about the prospects for" the human experience, "" he writes. "The problems caused by humans can also be solved by humans."

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