My mom called me at work to mention that today is the tenth anniversary of the closure of Biosphere 2 where I worked for nearly seven years. “Closure” in biospeak means sealing the structure with the original 8 person crew inside.
All the memories. Ten years ago today I had the most paralyzing hangover of my entire life. There was a massive party the night before while were were working and trying to get things done before the planned closure in the morning. I don’t think there was anyone actually monitoring the place the whole first day. The crew were pretty much zombies inside and we weren’t much better outside. I trudged to my office and collapsed in a chair until my parents came in. I may have actually shrieked in pain when they opened the door and sunlight hit my face. As I walked them back to their car I thought that actual ice picks in my head may be preferable to what I was feeling. When I looked in a mirror I briefly wondered why someone had replaced my head with a pumpkin.
Lucky sod. I did my best to follow it through widely separated periodicals. I didn’t even find out it had been called to halt until three years later.
Dish, dish my new friend! Leak more gory details, as its probably been long enough that nobody really cares anymore.
D’ya think anybody’ll try it again? D’ya think we’ve made enough advances to make it work better? Does there need to be a more rigorous psych screening? How much of a factor was boredom?
I got a million of 'em. I’ll go review whatever I can find, then I’ll be back…
I had the (dis)pleasure of visiting Biosphere2 last summer. It was a very disturbing experience. The site seemed like a ghost town–abandoned, falling apart. Well, except for the lush green lawns. In the Arizona desert!
The reality was considerably more bizarre and less funny than the Pauly Shore movie Bio Dome. Actually several of us who worked there including members of the second crew went to see it and we were the only ones in the theater laughing, were the only ones that got the inside jokes.
Biosphere 2 was the brainchild of John Allen and his group of hangers on including billionaire Ed Bass. The original goal was to prove the Gaia hypothesis, that the ecosystems of the earth are a self regulating entity. They wanted to prove this in a closed system. The original goal may not have been very scientific but they build the worlds biggest sealed building. The original spec was to have only one full exchange of air in 100 years but even at the much higher leak rate they experienced it was more tightly sealed than the space shuttle.
The first two year mission didn’t go as planned with one of the biospherians having to leave temporarily two weeks into the mission for emergency surgery (Jane Poynter chopped off a fingertip in a rice hulling machine) and later having to send replacement equipment inside. They did maintain the integrity of the sealed environment using the air locks at two of the three doors to the apparatus.
Problems came up due to record levels of cloud cover slowing plant growth but they never sent outside food in through the air locks. Oxygen did become a problem as CO[sub]2[/sub] was binding with the concrete lining. It wasn’t a big impact on the carbon cycle but took a lot of the free oxygen. O[sub]2[/sub] levels dropped so much that a candle would not burn. Great for fire prevention but a bitch for people trying to work. Climbing stairs would exhaust the crew. They couldn’t let this go on so a measured amount of oxygen was added via a tanker of LOX.
Things got a little weird a few years later when the second crew was inside and Ed Bass had took drastic measures to deal with mismanagement. He got a court order to have the entire management team removed by US marshals. I can honestly say that is the first time the feds had to raid my workplace. I thought it was an April fool’s day prank but that, and having the Biosphere featured on the front page of the National Enquirer for cult allegations added some spice to my resume.
After the takeover the place was run by court appointed receivers for a year and a half while looking for permanent management. Columbia University stepped in and established a campus for an earth studies semester. I haven’t been back in a while but Columbia has pretty much dismantled the biosphere structure so it’s no longer sealed.
