How many of us remember the Biosphere 2 project way back in 1991? Anyway, one of the first team members has come out with a book and WiredNews has an interview with her.
Life Inside the Biosphere Bubble
By Erica Gies
02:00 AM Oct, 18, 2006Jane Poynter entered the world’s first hermetically sealed, manufactured ecological system in 1991 with seven other people.
Biosphere 2 — the 3.15-acre, almost-airtight outpost in the Arizona desert that was to be their home for two years — proved impressively stable, although low oxygen levels and disappointing crop yields made survival a daily challenge. Eventually, pure oxygen had to be added to the system, and the team had to supplement its diet with food from an emergency stockpile stored before closure.
Throughout their stay, short tempers, depression and even the specter of insanity kept life interesting for the “biospherians.” In her new book, The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, Poynter gives an insider’s view of the famous experiment. She spoke with Wired News about cult rumors, Biosphere 2’s unique usefulness to climatologists and her time inside the bubble.
(snip)
WN: Rumors of dodgy science plagued Biosphere 2 during your stay. In comparing the work your team accomplished to the later work of the Columbia University teams inside Biosphere 2, do you think the science your team did was less controlled?
Poynter: It was very different. What our team was doing was asking a very basic question: Does this even work? Can you take an essentially sealed container and put what we think are developed ecosystems inside this container and have it exist for a long period of time? And if something goes wrong, can we figure out what that something is, and can we fix it? That was really what we were asking in our two-year mission. That was a very different charter than Columbia had (when the Biosphere 2 project was turned over to it in 1995)…. They were then using this thing that we had built to answer very specific questions about how corals react to elevated carbon dioxide, for instance. So it’s a very different kind of science. Initially, honestly, to a large degree, it was almost an engineering project, and we were answering the question: Does it work?
(snip)
[in answering another question] And things happen faster in closed systems. Outside, you’re at the mercy of this huge atmosphere that we have out here, so in order to experiment with elevated CO2 either you have to wait for it to actually go up in this giant atmosphere, or you have to build these things where you try to force CO2 over the top of the plants and that kind of thing. Whereas in Biosphere 2 the atmosphere is so tiny you can track how things move through the atmosphere, through the soil, through the plants — you can track the atoms and the molecules through the system very rapidly. And that’s why Columbia University was so into it.
link to article
text in brackets [ ] are mine, not the author of the article
Oh, and Biosphere 1 is Earth itself.
I find this all interesting as it fits into the theme/plot of my WIP “Centric“. I write scenes for it whenever I feel insprired enough. I need to get more serious about it, ya know?
Linkage:
WiredNews: 10 Lessons from Biosphere 2
Wikipedia: Biosphere 2 | Jane Poynter
The book “The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2″
Biospherics.org