Its ecological self-organisation showed us how it best adapted to the environment inside
Biosphere 2.
The
Biosphere 2 story begins with an intentional community, Synergia Ranch, and its visionary leader, John Allen.
In 2003 Columbia decided to pull out, and
Biosphere 2 has been kept open for paid public tours since then.
The sample from the
Biosphere 2 ocean had the next lowest concentration (66 pg/L), indicating that high residence time of water over the reef community--in this case, eight years--does not necessarily create high concentrations of estrogen.
Biosphere 2, so called because the Earth itself is considered Biosphere 1, offers tours and overnight stays to people interested in the high-tech nerve center of earth-science research and education.
A junior at Notre Dame in Indiana, Glynn was one of 50 college students who gathered at
Biosphere 2 in the scenic Arizona desert to participate in Columbia University's "Earth Semester" an innovative four-and-a-half-month, 16-credit undergraduate program.
Originally conceived as a sealed laboratory for would-be explorers of Mars,
Biosphere 2 fell into scientific disrepute when its eight original residents suffered from a lack of oxygen in their artificial atmosphere (see sidebar).
Biosphere 2 was supposed to be a self-sustaining world-within-a-world, a potential model for a colony in space (see SW 9/20/91, p.
The ecosystems of
Biosphere 2 are varied and complex.
Small-scale rain forests, oceans, and marshes are being built inside
Biosphere 2, a 9100-square-meter steel, glass, and concrete structure in the Arizona desert under development by Space Biospheres Ventures (Oracle, Ariz.).
* On 26 September 1993, four women and four men smartly dressed in navy blue overalls, walked out through the airlock of
Biosphere 2 to breath the planets natural air for the first time in two years.
Millions of people have heard about
Biosphere 2's problems, which led to the termination of human experiments in 1994.