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Editorial: “Reality bites: The lessons of Biosphere 2“

See more in our gallery: “Earth in miniature: Tour a mini-world under glass“

AROUND 10am, the rain began to fall. It wasn’t especially heavy, but it was relentless. Hour after hour the downpour continued, soaking into the deep black soil. After midnight, the hill was saturated, and the water began to pool on the surface and run, carving a gully that deepened and flared as the rain continued.

A few weeks later, I am standing beneath that hill. Overhead, the sun shines in through a latticework of white metal bars. In front of me is the slush of black mud that washed onto the concrete floor, much to the consternation of the rain-makers. They hadn’t meant to carve out a chunk of the hillside – after all, they had only just built it.

Once, the giant glass chamber in which the storm took place was filled with sweet potato fields and rice paddies. It is part of a giant sealed complex of greenhouses built at the base of the Santa Catalina mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, which is home to a rainforest, savannah and even a miniature ocean. This is Biosphere 2, a facility built to prove that it was possible for humans to survive in a closed environment – with the help of some sunlight.

When a group of eight people were sealed into Biosphere 2 in 1991, the project was hailed as a groundbreaking scientific endeavour. The “Biospherians” were to live entirely on the food they grew, drink recycled water and breathe oxygen made by the plants. It was meant to provide a blueprint for spaceships and colonies on other planets, as well as teaching us more about the planet we live on.

That was the plan, anyway. The first “mission” was plagued by problems including falling oxygen levels. The team made another attempt a couple of years later, but it ended early and the costly facility later fell into disuse. In 2007, it was on the brink of being converted into condos. Now, though, the Biosphere is again a hub of scientific activity, and I’ve come to find out what’s happening.

The idea for Biosphere 2 came from the Synergists, a rather cult-like environmental group led by the charismatic and at times temperamental John Allen. Its members were inspired by , along with other principles such as balancing business with philosophy and theatre.

Allen’s plans for Biosphere 2 – the planet being Biosphere 1 – crystallised at a meeting in the French countryside in 1982 attended by some leading scientists. Soon after, the Synergists began drawing up plans for a sealed structure that would serve as a trial Mars colony, potential nuclear fallout shelter and live-in laboratory that would enable big-picture research on whole ecosystems.

The project was announced to great fanfare. A 1987 Discover magazine article declared Biosphere 2 “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the US since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon”. The Biospherians seemed every bit as heroic as astronauts.

With funding from Ed Bass, a Texas billionaire and environmentalist sympathetic to the Synergists’ cause, the project began to take shape, with glass domes growing up out of the Arizona desert. The ambitious plan required the largest sealed environment ever created, big enough to house a rainforest, mangrove swamp, savannah, desert and even an “ocean” with coral reefs and waves. There was also a large space for growing food, complete with farm equipment including a threshing machine. Just 10 days into the debut mission in 1991, the Biospherian Jane Poynter caught her hand in it and lopped off the end of her middle finger.

Today, for a new project, the fields have been replaced by hills. Under each arc of the glass roof, there is a black slope about the size of a tennis court, made of a metre-deep layer of crushed volcanic rock (pictured below). What’s extraordinary, though, is that each “hillslope” sits in a giant metal tray, so it can be weighed. From below, all you see is the lime-green metal framework.

The rest of Biosphere 2 is still much as it was, though as John Adams, assistant director of the facility, gives me a look behind the scenes, he points out where tweaks have been made. In the rainforest, for example, he pulls up a large metal plate, revealing a deep hole that makes it easy to take soil samples. We continue along the forest edge, past banana trees that butt up against the glass, before we pop out at the edge of a viewing platform – much to the surprise of a tour group following the approved path.

Energy guzzler

We wend our way to the small patch of beach alongside the ocean. The air is humid and briny. There are still a few fish in the murky green water, though the corals and many of the other species of animal introduced originally – at great expense – are long gone. Later, we stand in the savannah, on a ridge above the ocean. Nearby, just beyond the mangrove swamp, hang large plastic sheets that separate the desert biome from the others. Adams plucks a bright red fruit from a Barbados cherry tree that overhangs the path, and hands it to me. The small, apple-like cherry is delicious – sweet, but not overly so. He hands me another, telling me it is OK to spit the seeds onto the ground.

Adams also takes me through the Biosphere’s underbelly – a maze of pipes, vents, water tanks and huge empty vats once used to process human waste. Some of the pipes are part of the cooling system: keeping a sealed greenhouse cool in a desert requires vast amounts of energy. This is why Biosphere 2, far from being self-sufficient, has relentlessly guzzled electricity – and money.

Though much of what we are seeing was in the original plans, construction of Biosphere 2 began while the design was still being finalised. There were some unique challenges to overcome. For instance, to stop the structure bursting open as the air inside warms and expands during the day, two chambers – the “lungs” – had to be built containing enormous rubber membranes that can balloon outwards. The completed building was a remarkable feat of engineering, but the simultaneous design and construction led to costly adjustments. The original budget of $30 million ballooned to an eye-watering $250 million.

The problems did not stop when the doors shut on 26 September 1991, sealing in the eight Biospherians – all kitted out in Star Trek-like uniforms – for two years. Chief among these, perhaps, was that it was not clear what they were supposed to do. No formal research plan had ever been drawn up. Instead, the management emphasised a goal that was more theatre than science: nothing should go in or out for the full two years.

So when Poynter had to leave for a few hours to have her injury treated so soon after the initial “lock-in”, it cast a pall over the project. “We had a stated goal of nothing going in or out for the two years – and it was going to work perfectly, which of course was ridiculous,” she says. “That’s not a scientific goal. We set ourselves up to fail, which was silly.”

There were a host of other problems, too, from wildly fluctuating carbon dioxide levels to pests running riot. The media honeymoon soon came to an end, and the coverage turned increasingly critical. Most seriously of all, the Biospherians struggled to grow enough food, and the oxygen level was falling. They were slowly starving and suffocating.

The fall in oxygen was baffling. If living organisms were to blame, there should have been a corresponding rise in CO₂, but there wasn’t. The cause was . The soil in the agriculture area had been filled with rich compost, and it teemed with microbes that gobbled up oxygen as they fed on the organic matter. But the full extent of their activity was hidden because the CO₂ they produced was to form carbonates. “We didn’t test every aspect of the biosphere in exactly the same environment that they would be in, and we had some materials that interacted with each other in a way that we didn’t expect,” says Poynter.

In retrospect, this was a valuable insight. “The early problems they had with the atmosphere told us a lot about what we didn’t know about earth systems, and how the land surface and the atmosphere work together,” says Travis Huxman, who was the director of Biosphere 2 from 2007 until 2012.

“The problems they had with the atmosphere told us a lot about what we didn’t know about earth systems”

Indeed, land-atmosphere interactions have become a hot topic because of climate change. As CO₂ levels soar and the planet warms, will plants and soils soak up ever more CO₂ and slow the process? Or will they start to release CO₂, making things worse? This is where those new giant trays of black dirt come in.

The dirt is pulverised rock from a volcano that erupted about 18,000 years ago. “To a geologist it erupted yesterday,” says Steve DeLong of the Earthquake Science Center at the US Geological Survey, the lead scientist on the new project up until December 2012. This rock was chosen because it weathers – reacts with the atmosphere – very rapidly. After three years, it will have become more of a soil and the plan is to introduce plants. Two years after that, the three trays will be separated and subjected to different conditions.

For instance, one slope could be switched from Sonoran desert conditions with summer rainfall, to Mediterranean conditions with winter rainfall. “Just observing the response of that ecosystem to that sudden change of climate will be spectacular,” says hydrologist Peter Troch, the current science director at Biosphere 2. “That’s just one idea.”

Each of the three trays is equipped with 1300 sensors, so it should be possible to work out precisely how much carbon enters or leaves the hillsides, among many other things. The findings can then be fed into – and help to shape – climate models.

So the new project is very much in line with the original mission of understanding ecosystems as a whole. And some of the lessons learned in the early days of Biosphere 2 could yet help realise other initial visions, of mastering space and colonising other worlds. Many of those planning on building bases out of Moon or Mars rock, for instance, are now aware that it might react with terrestrial air.

Poynter and her fellow Biospherian – now husband – Taber MacCallum are applying their hard-earned knowledge directly. They run , a Tucson-based firm that develops life-support systems for NASA and other clients. “The approach to life-support and spacecraft design that we have really comes from our Biosphere 2 days,” Poynter says.

But back in 1992, the goal of keeping Biosphere 2 sealed meant that the falling oxygen levels were seen as a failure rather than an opportunity. The media and the scientific advisory committee were not told about the problems until late in the day. When the committee drew up recommendations for more rigorous research, Allen was dismissive.

Starved and suffocating

By January 1993, oxygen levels had fallen so low that extra oxygen had to be injected into the facility. The following month, with their advice still unheeded, the entire scientific committee resigned in frustration. “Surprises in experiments are wonderful, that’s where you learn,” says Huxman. “But if you have surprises in the experiments and surprises in the engineering and surprises in the personnel, it’s hard to see what knowledge is being produced.”

Meanwhile the Biospherians, no longer suffocating but still hungry, were struggling to cope. Initial tensions were amplified by disagreements over the press coverage and scientific goals. By the end, there were two camps of four people each, and barely a word exchanged between them. (This unplanned soap opera inspired the reality television hit Big Brother – perhaps Biosphere 2’s most questionable contribution to the world.)

“This unplanned soap opera was the inspiration for the reality television hit Big Brother”

Though they finished that first two-year experiment, Biosphere 2’s scientific legitimacy had been gravely damaged. A second enclosure experiment began in March 1994, but a month into that attempt Bass – frustrated by growing costs and a lack of communication – seized back the property with the help of federal marshals. Days later, two of the original Biospherians tried to sabotage the experiment – opening the doors to the outside. After just seven months, the second attempt ended. The era of the Synergists was over.

In December 1995, Columbia University took over the lease. The rice paddies and sweet potato fields were pulled up and cottonwood trees planted in their place. Researchers partitioned off the giant greenhouse, varying the conditions in each area – one of the criticisms of the original project was that there were no controls. They studied how changes in temperature at different heights of the canopy affected leaf respiration, investigated the invasive species of ants that had snuck in, and monitored reef-building in the ocean.

But in 2003, just as the researchers were hitting their stride, the university ended its lease. Not only was running the facility too costly – the energy bills alone ran to $600,000 per year, most of it for cooling – but the university also was not allowed to make any major changes. “You couldn’t break it,” says Greg Barron-Gafford, an ecologist who worked in Biosphere 2 during this time and is back working on the new project. “It wasn’t ours. It was on loan from Ed Bass.”

For the next four years Biosphere 2 was no more than a tourist attraction. Experiments were left unfinished. Barron-Gafford recalls returning to the site in 2007: “A lot of our stuff was still there – pens on the desk, things just as they were left.”

The facility was at risk of being bulldozed to make way for condos when the University of Arizona stepped in and took over the lease in 2007. In 2011, the building was donated to the university, and Bass contributed $20 million to help get the new project off the ground.

The new owners have still had to make cutbacks, though. The former agriculture zone is now open to outside air, and the biomes that are still sealed are being cooled less. The upper canopy of the rainforest is being allowed to grow more – or wither in the summer sun – to reduce maintenance. The savannah will be rained on less frequently. Such changes have cut electricity bills by $250,000 per year.

The new project consists of the giant artificial hillsides in the former agriculture zone, now called the . The project is meant to run for at least 10 years. The grand aim is to create for the earth sciences something akin to what physicists have at CERN. “My hope is that we can, once and for all, get rid of the legacy that Biosphere 2 equals failure – or weird science,” says Troch.

It has not been a perfect start. According to the computer model, the slope should have been able to take at least 24 hours of rain at 12 millimetres per hour. It was clearly way off. “We didn’t think halfway into the first day we’d have this surprise,” Adams admits.

This time round, though, there is no attempt to hide the problems. I am even allowed to listen in on a conference call with outside researchers to discuss the unintended results of the first experiment. Bass was among those on the line. You could almost hear him shaking his head as he questioned the “enormously aggressive” rainfall. “That’s like taking a newborn aircraft and deciding you’re going to fly it around the world on the first flight,” he said.

Fortunately, the craft can be fixed, and its journey will resume. As I drive away from this intriguing structure in the desert, I wonder if the lessons learned here at Biosphere 2 will yet help save Biosphere 1.

This article appeared in print under the headline “A biosphere reborn”