Biosphere Tower BW
by Ginger Stein
Title
Biosphere Tower BW
Artist
Ginger Stein
Medium
Photograph - Monochrome Photography
Description
An image up into the tower of Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2 is a science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona. It was originally constructed between 1987 and 1991, and has been owned by the University of Arizona since 2011. Its mission is to serve as a center for research, outreach, teaching, and lifelong learning about Earth, its living systems, and its place in the universe. It is a 3+ acre structure originally built to be an artificial, closed ecological system, or vivarium. Think : "people in a huge terrarium" of sorts. It remains the largest closed system ever created.
Biosphere 2 was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space. It was designed to explore the web of interactions within life systems in a structure with different areas based on various biological biomes. Its mission was a two-year closure experiment with a crew of eight humans. It includes a rainforest, an ocean with a coral reef, mangrove wetlands, grassland savannah, and a fog desert, in addition to living quarters, laboratory and farming space.
Biosphere 2 was only used twice for its original intended purposes as a closed-system experiment: once from 1991 to 1993, and the second time from March to September 1994. Both attempts, though heavily publicized, ran into problems including low amounts of food and oxygen, die-offs of many animals and plants included in the experiment (though this was anticipated since the project used a strategy of deliberately "species-packing" anticipating losses as the biomes developed), group dynamic tensions among the resident crew, outside politics and a power struggle over management and direction of the project. Nevertheless, the closure experiments set world records in closed ecological systems, agricultural production, health improvements with the high nutrient and low caloric diet the crew followed, and insights into the self-organization of complex biomes and atmosphere dynamics. systems and atmospheric dynamics. The second closure experiment achieved total food sufficiency and did not require injection of oxygen.
Uploaded
July 27th, 2018
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