As director of external affairs for Biosphere 2, Hassan Hijazi
sometimes finds himself fielding phone calls from Hollywood producers
who want to know if the giant terrarium is available for reality-TV
shows.
He politely lets them know that the Biosphere is more interested in
working with the Discovery Channel these days.
“We want to do serious science at the Biosphere,” Hijazi says.
That hasn’t always been the case. The Biosphere 2 has, in the words
of UA College of Science Dean Joaquin Ruiz, “a complicated
history.”
When it was first under construction in the late 1980s on Oracle
Road/Highway 77 north of the tiny community of Catalina, the gleaming
glass building—which covers roughly 3.14 acres and rises 91 feet
from the ground—was designed to be sealed up for a century, with
small crews rotating in and out every two years. It included different
“biomes”—a tropical rainforest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove
wetland, a desert, a small saltwater ocean and beach, and a farm where
Biospherians were to grow their food—along with compact crew
quarters and a mission-control center that bore some resemblance to the
starship Enterprise.
The first jump-suited crew entered the building in 1991, with
considerable media fanfare and the suggestion that this could be the
first step toward developing outposts on other planets.
But many scientists were skeptical of Biosphere 2, and the mission
came to a premature end shortly after the second crew entered the
facility in 1994. Billionaire Ed Bass, a Texas oilman whose fortune
paid for most of the Biosphere’s $150 million construction cost, pulled
the plug on the management and eventually turned over control to
Columbia University, which ran it until the college abandoned the
project in 2003.
Today, Biosphere 2 and the 1,650 acres that surround it are owned by
CDO Ranching and Development, which plans to build green, luxury homes
on the property.
In the meantime, CDO is leasing out the 34-acre Biosphere 2 campus
to the University of Arizona, which is covering the costs of running
the facility through a $30 million grant from Bass’ Philecology
Foundation.
Travis Huxman, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who
is the director of Biosphere 2, says a team of UA faculty consulted
among themselves and with outside scientists to determine how they
could use the facility for research before agreeing to take it
over.
“We’ve seen it go through cycles of promising good science and then
being less than able to deliver on it,” Huxman says. “We wanted to be
sure that we would be doing science that couldn’t be done anywhere else
and use the facility to full capacity. … If you can do it somewhere
else, you should, because it’s cheaper.”
The new focus: studying the impact of climate change, particularly
on water patterns.
Several small-scale studies are underway; Huxman was a co-author of
the first peer-reviewed paper involving the Biosphere 2 since the UA
took it over. The report, which ran in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, examined how well piñon pines
from New Mexico survived under drought conditions in different biomes.
The conclusion: Under typical drought conditions, the pines die off
five times more often if temperatures rise by 7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Researchers are now planning their first large-scale experiment.
They’ve cleared out the biome where Biospherians once grew their crops,
and the now-bare concrete floor will soon be covered by experimental
hillsides to better understand how water moves through the earth from
mountains to rivers, says John Adams, Biosphere 2’s assistant director
for planning and facilities.
Once three hillsides have been created, researchers will pour rain
onto them and use sensors to measure the movement of the water. After
taking those measurements for a few years, they’ll add vegetation and
eventually start adjusting temperatures and CO2 levels.
“This will be an experiment that will be 10 years or longer, and
you’ve got people who are soil scientists; you’ve got plant
physiologists; you’ve got people who put together all these models and
predictions of how things may or may not change if temperatures rise or
CO2 levels increase,” says Adams.
How water patterns will be altered as a result of climate change
remains a mystery. Huxman says Biosphere 2 offers the chance for
researchers from hydrology, ecology and atmospheric sciences to find
new ways to collaborate on water studies.
“It’s a little shocking that something that’s so important to us
doesn’t have a stitched-together fundamental theory,” Huxman says. “We
understood how to split an atom and create an atomic bomb before we
understood the physics of how water ascended a tree and evaporated into
the atmosphere.”
Researchers at work on experiments sometimes play a public role,
explaining their work to visitors to Biosphere 2. The tours—last
year, the facility hosted about 65,000 people, but the university hopes
to boost that number to 120,000 within a few years to generate funds to
help offset operating costs—take guests through the biomes and
offer a look at the old living quarters. Visitors also get a backstage
peek at the concrete tunnels underneath Biosphere 2, where rumbling
machinery and a network of pipes and vents maintain temperatures and
other climate conditions.
Maintaining those environments in the Sonoran Desert summer is not
cheap, but the university is working to lower the costs. Opening some
windows and venting the giant greenhouse has helped lower energy costs
by as much as 70 percent, Adams says.
As a first step toward developing solar energy on the property,
Biosphere 2 received a donation of 470 solar panels earlier this year,
courtesy of SOLON Corp., a German engineering firm that has a Tucson
manufacturing plant.
The 40 kilowatts of solar panels will help power a collection of
casitas and a conference center known as the B2 Institute, where the UA
hosts symposiums, teaching seminars and other get-togethers. This
summer, for example, it played host to elementary-school science and
math teachers from around the state who attended a three-week training
course to hone instructional skills.
Jim Gentile, the executive director of Tucson-based Research
Corporation for Science Advancement and a member of Biosphere 2’s
advisory board, says hosting conferences at the facility offers a
chance for participants to seriously focus on whatever topic is at
hand.
“For those kinds of conferences, you don’t want to go to a fancy
resort, because there’s too much else to do,” Gentile says. “People
lose the focus of why they’re there. Having a rattlesnake-surrounded
conference center as nice as the Biosphere is really of value.”
This article appears in Aug 20-26, 2009.
