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In full desert of Sonora, on the American side of the border, a large glass building that looks like the scenario of a science fiction novel set on another planet is erected. We are not unchanged. Biosphere 2 is a complex of more than one hectare which houses a tropical jungle, a savanna and even an ocean with coral reef. Here, between 1991 and 1993, eight crew members known as the “biospheric” enclosed themselves tightly for two years.
The mission. Survive self -sufficiently, cultivating their own food, recycling the water they drank and breathing the oxygen generated by their plants. An extravagant scientific experiment to better understand the complexity of our planet and prove if possible Create similar habitats To colonize the moon or Mars.
The experiment, however, ended up becoming a logistics nightmare and a media drama. As Murphy’s law sends, “everything that could go wrong, went wrong.” In spite of this, Biosphere is seen today as a lesson advanced in his time, whose facilities are now a laboratory to study climate change and a popular tourist attraction.
An Eden in an aircraft carrier. Biosphere 2’s idea was not born in a NASA laboratory, but in an ecoaldea in New Mexico. John Allen and other organic agriculture enthusiasts dreamed of creating a closed system to better understand the earth. The project was possible thanks to the financing of billionaire Ed Bass, which invested about 150 million dollars of the time (equivalent to more than 400 million dollars).
The structure was a wonder of engineering. Above, biomes full of life; below, a “techno -sphere” of bombs, pipes and systems to control from temperature to moisture. One of the biosphericos described him as “the garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier.” In September 1991, eight people (four men and four women) crossed the air lock to embark on a two -year msion.
It lacked oxygen. In A TED talkthe biosfical Jane Poynter described her experience as “visceral.” It took four months to make a pizza. He had to harvest the wheat, grind it, milked the goats to make the cheese and wait. “I was eating the same carbon again and again,” he recalls. “We ate so many sweet potatoes that I began to put orange.”
But the small land had a much more serious problem: the chopped drop in oxygen levels. Oxygen went from 21% to 14.2% in 16 months, the equivalent of being at the top of a mountain of more than 4,000 meters. “We crawled through the biosphere,” says Poynter. “At night we had sleep apnea. I woke up desperate to take a breath.”
The culprits were soil microorganisms. They had used a nutrient -rich substrate to accelerate crop growth, but this caused an explosion of bacteria and fungi that consumed much more oxygen than plants could replace.
They were left over cockroaches. While humans had difficulty breathing, other living beings in Biosphere prospered. The pollinating species, such as bees, were extinguished, probably because the glass blocked the ultraviolet light they need to see the flowers. The plants did not do very well either. Some trees grew weak and broke through the lack of wind, which did not stimulate them to create tension wood to strengthen themselves.
Without predators, ants and cockroaches became the queens of the place, invading everything. The situation became unsustainable. They had to pump oxygen from the outside, which for many media sentenced the project as a fraud. Personal conflicts between the eight inhabitants, isolated and under immense pressure, became Carnaza for the headlines. When a biosphical had to be evacuated by an accident on a finger, they were accused of cheating.
Success or failure? Although the experiment was ridiculed in its day, today it is no longer seen as a failure. He crudely demonstrated how incredibly difficult it is to replicate the ecosystems that the earth provides us for free. And he put relevant who really govern the world: Microorganismswhose role in the regulation of the atmosphere had underestimated.
For biosphericos, the experience was transformative. “Being in a small system where you see that your survival depends on the health of the ecosystems that surround you change your way of thinking to a very deep level,” he told BBC Future Mark Nelson, another participants.
Today you can visit. After the end of the original mission, and after a second mission that was aborted shortly due to lack of financing, Biosphere 2 passed to the University of Arizona. Today, far from being a relic, it is a top -level scientific laboratory and a popular tourist attraction that has received more than three million visitors.
Scientists use their controlled biomes as a time machine to simulate the effects of climate change. In the tropical jungle the effects of extreme heat droughts and heat waves are studied. In addition to testing the limits of coffee and cocoa culture. In the ocean, heat waves are simulated to prove the resistance of the corals to acidification. And fish banks are also created for their future reintroduction in their natural habitat.
Biosphere 2 has completed the circle. He was born as an attempt to escape from the earth and has become one of our best tools to understand it and, hopefully, save it. As Jane Poynter concluded: In the end, we all live in a biosphere and we are connected by each breath we take. “They inhale deeply. There may be carbon of dinosaurs in this breath. The carbon that they exhale can now be in the breath of their tátara-tara grandchildren.”
Image | Arizona University
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