Biosphere 2 may be more relevant now

Jane Poynter and seven compatriots agreed to spend two years sealed inside a 3-acre terrarium in the Sonoran Desert. Their mission back in the 1990s: to see whether humans might someday be able to create self-sustaining colonies in outer space.

Two decades later, the only creatures inhabiting Biosphere 2 are cockroaches, nematodes, snails, crazy ants and assorted fish. Scientists still are using the 7.2 million-square-foot facility, only now the focus is figuring out how we'll survive on our own warming planet.

Soon, workers will begin a new chapter for "B2," building the first of three enclosed soil slopes in what was once the "intensive agricultural biome," the space where Poynter and the other original "biospherians" grew the rice, sorghum, peanuts, bananas, papayas, sweet potatoes and lablab beans that supplied 90 percent of their nutritional needs.

The new "Land Evolution Observatory" — a 10-year, $5 million project — will help scientists learn how vegetation, topography and other factors affect rainwater's journey through a watershed and into our drinking supplies.

"What makes me really happy is that it really does capture a lot of what we were trying to do in the early years of Biosphere 2," says Poynter, who founded an aerospace company with husband and fellow biospherian Taber MacCallum. "I mean, they're doing some world-class science. They really have the vision of the place. They understand what it was intended for in many ways."

And researchers say Biosphere 2 may be even more relevant today than when those first people passed through the airlocks on Sept. 26, 1991.

Located about 30 miles northeast of Tucson in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains, B2 rises out of the high-desert landscape like a giant glass-and-steel ziggurat.

In a story previewing that first mission in 1991, The New York Times described Biosphere 2 — Earth is "Biosphere 1" — as a "combination greenhouse and futuristic shopping mall." But with its network of interconnected domed chambers and observatory-topped tower, anchored by the 91-foot-high pyramid and its 6,500 double-laminated windows, the complex resembles nothing so much as one of those plastic Habitrails you kept your hamsters and gerbils in as a kid.

Co-founded by counterculture ecologist John Polk Allen and Edward Perry Bass, the billionaire Texas environmentalist who put up the initial $30 million bankroll, Biosphere 2 was described variously as an example of "vision and courage" and, as Ecology magazine put it, "New Age drivel masquerading as science."

The facility at SunSpace Ranch contained five distinct ecosystems, or "biomes": a mangrove wetland, tropical rainforest, savanna grassland, coastal fog desert and 600,000-gallon "ocean" with its own wave-lapped sand beach and living coral reef. All told, nearly 4,000 species of animals and plants lived there.

The building — with its network of 52 tanks that collected up to 5,000 gallons of water from the air each day and "rained" it back into the various biomes, and two massive domed "lungs" that kept the airtight building from exploding or imploding as outside temperatures fluctuated from below freezing to more than 120 degrees — was an engineering marvel.

It wasn't long, however, before the biospherians began experiencing serious problems.

First, just a couple of weeks into the mission, Poynter, manager of field agricultural crops, sliced off the tip of her left middle finger in a rice-hulling machine. Poynter reluctantly left the B2 briefly for surgery, but still lost the fingertip.

Project officials had boasted that B2 was more airtight than the space shuttle, but by December, tests showed leakage, and outside air had to be pumped in.

Over time, oxygen levels inside B2 had dropped to dangerous levels, while carbon dioxide spiked. Poynter and the others were experiencing lethargy, shortness of breath, sleep apnea and "mood swings."

There were explosions in the cockroach and ant populations. The coral reef died. Then there were revelations that a carbon dioxide scrubber had been installed, belying the notion that the plants would keep the air pure, and that the facility had been stocked with outside food.

Biosphere 2 had a 100-year business model: 50 two-year missions, but after one more group of eight finished its two-year tour in 1994, the live-in phase at B2 was over.

Columbia University became B2's "managing university partner" in 1996 and began manipulating carbon dioxide levels in the now "flow-through" system to study global warming. Columbia left in 2003, and nothing much went on there until June 2007, when the University of Arizona became the "managing university partner."

In a way, B2has been recycled. Everywhere you look, there are experiments going on.

In one current project, researchers from a German company have draped green and white blankets bristling with solar panels over a series of old mine "tailings," the elongated debris piles that surround B2 and snake through the Southwest. Such arrays already allow B2 to go "off the grid" if necessary, and the hope is they may someday dot the landscape, preventing erosion and producing renewable energy.

They're even studying B2, which, aside from the odd cracked windowpane or spot of surface rust, looks pretty good for its age.

Matt Adamson, senior education and outreach coordinator, says researchers are in the middle of a survey of all plant life inside Biosphere 2, which will then be compared against the original planting charts. They've already found one species of palmlike cycad, Zamia fischeri, that is now endangered in the outside world.