Now Here's a Homestead--Biosphere2 For Sale

[fin29]

Every growing zone in the world under one roof...


http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/0....ap/index.html

TUCSON, Arizona (AP) -- The company that owns Biosphere 2 Center, 3.1 glass-enclosed acres designed to simulate the Earth's environment, has put the site up for sale.

The company is also selling 70 other buildings on the center's 140-acre campus 16 miles north of Tucson, said Christopher Bannon, general manager of Decisions Investment Corp. of Fort Worth, Texas.

"We'd love to see the Biosphere 2 used as a research activity, but we know that may not be the end result," he said last week...

[BCR]

Did anyone else follow that as closely as I did? Heck, I even bought a book about it. I found it fascinating if doomed. Bet it costs an arm and a leg....and there were some inherent issues to be dealt with construction-wise weren't there? Like some places where outside creatures could get in?

Wonder what it will sell for...

[Ana Bluebird]

Can you imagine the cost of just maintenance? Did they ever actually learn anything from it? I'll have to admit that it was interesting though.

[whodunit]

Hmmmm. I only have 10 windows to wash in my house and I have a hard time keeping them clean at that number. Could you imagine 3.1 acres of windows

I can imagine it would be fun to have that place as a house and garden.


Mrs WHodunit

[Terri]

Originally Posted by BCR

Did anyone else follow that as closely as I did? Heck, I even bought a book about it. I found it fascinating if doomed. Bet it costs an arm and a leg....and there were some inherent issues to be dealt with construction-wise weren't there? Like some places where outside creatures could get in?

Wonder what it will sell for...

Cool.

Do you remember the name of the book? I looked for one for a while, but never found anything. When it failed everyone seemed to want to NOT talk about it any longer. Too bad, it really WAS interesting!

[havellostmywings]

Originally Posted by Ana Bluebird

Can you imagine the cost of just maintenance? Did they ever actually learn anything from it? I'll have to admit that it was interesting though.

They learned that animals make a lot of manure in a small area and sugar beets grow like crazy...

I followed this also.. because I honestly believe that this an alternative growing medium...

I believe their biggest mistake was they tried to include ALL types of hemisphere types, desert, ocean, fertile, mountains, etc... I really dont feel that all of those in such a small confined area will ever work.. you need to concentrate on what is healthy for life of a certain number of species, not all... and then work from there...

They scientists had nutrition problems, because they didnt want to eat the animals, and because the season for some fruits and herbs they needed, took to long for the experiment. They were ill prepared and had no real survival training, just a scientists curiousity on how this would work.

Oh well, I have dreamed of owning the biosphere, but, cannot afford it..

Lynn in Texas

[Terri]

"They scientists had nutrition problems, because they didnt want to eat the animals, and because the season for some fruits and herbs they needed, took to long for the experiment. They were ill prepared and had no real survival training, just a scientists curiousity on how this would work."

Yes, that was my impression also. And, because they were not eating enough and eating the wrong foods, they got cranky and fought among themselves. They also needed more garden space for beans and grain and high-fat crops.

[sisterpine]

Wow, how cool is that. I have been in that place. Was a cop in tucson when they had some vandalism! I got the really grand tour. If i were rich i would sure buy it!

[diane]

"If i were rich i would sure buy it!"

ditto!!! I found it absolutely fascinating. Too bad more of that sort of research isn't funded instead of war.

[FrankTheTank]

It was doomed because Oxygen levels plummeted and made it like they were living on a mountain...

My2 - Chemistry MysteriesBiosphere II
Out of Oxygen

By Joseph Alper

On September 26, 1993, four men and four women walked out of the world's largest glass bubble, known as Biosphere II, into the Arizona desert and breathed a sigh of relief: Literally. They breathed deeply, smelling the fresh, rich, warm air, drawing it into their lungs. The Biosphere II in Arizona

For two years, the eight-person crew of Biosphere II?Earth is considered Biosphere I?had lived sealed within a 12,000 m2 miniworld, complete with a tropical rain forest, savanna, marsh, desert, ocean, and working farm. Their goal was to begin testing the idea that humans could design and build a totally contained ecosystem, one that could someday sustain human life on Mars without any outside help.

Unattainable goal?

But that goal was in jeopardy from the moment that the eight pioneers entered Biosphere II in September 1991 and shut the five airlocks behind them. Sensors within the facility showed that the oxygen concentration in Biosphere II's atmosphere was falling from its initial level of 21% by volume, while the amount of carbon dioxide was rising from its initial level of 0.035% by volume. At first, the Biospherians assumed that the shifts in oxygen and carbon dioxide were merely signs that the ecosystem was equilibrating.

A few months came and went, and oxygen levels continued to fall at a rate about 0.5% a month. Carbon dioxide concentrations were rising, too, forcing the crew to turn on the electric-powered chemical scrubbers, similar to those used on submarines, to remove some of the excess. As a result, carbon dioxide levels fluctuated between 2,000 and 4,000 ppm, high but not dangerous. In fact, the carbon dioxide soon stabilized around 4,000 ppm on its own, so the crew shut down the scrubbers. As far as the oxygen concentration was concerned, the project's managers, outside the dome, decided to forge ahead and take no remedial action, hoping that the decline would stop and the crew would become accustomed to breathing the oxygen-depleted air, much as people who live in the mountains do.

The decline didn't stop, though, and after a year the crew was showing signs of distress. By January 1993?16 months into the experiment?the oxygen concentration had dropped to 14%, the equivalent of breathing air at 4,360-meter elevation. The Biospherians could not thrive in such low oxygen. A medical emergency was at hand, and Biosphere II's project managers decided to pump in a total 15.7 tons of pure oxygen. Though oxygen levels resumed their decline after each of three additions, the crew was able to recover and finish the final eight months of their mission.

Examining the puzzle

Meanwhile, scientists in the outside world puzzled over the vanishing oxygen. A small part of the loss was blamed on unusually cloudy weather that slowed plant growth, particularly in Biosphere II's agricultural plots but also in the rain forest. As a result, the ecosystem's plants did not produce as much oxygen through photosynthesis as had been expected.

Attention turned to Biosphere II's manufactured soils. Some suspected that iron in the soils was reacting with oxygen to form iron oxide, or rust. Others proposed that nitrogen in the soils was reacting with oxygen to produce nitrates, but these would have shown up in Biosphere II's water supply, and there was no sign of that happening. A third hypothesis was that microbes were using oxygen to metabolize the excess organic matter that had been added to the agricultural, savanna, and rain forest soils to encourage plant growth. But microbial metabolism produces carbon dioxide and, if microbes were responsible for the observed drop in oxygen, the CO2should have reached 40,000 ppm or more.

Enter Wallace Broecker, professor of geochemistry at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York City. Broecker, who is a scientific adviser for Biosphere II, suspected from the start that microbial oxidation was the cause of the falling oxygen level and that the real problem was to account for the missing carbon dioxide. That's the challenge he gave his graduate student, Jeffrey Severinghaus: Don't worry about the missing oxygen?find the missing carbon dioxide.

The search continues

Severinghaus' first hypothesis was that calcium silicate in the soil was reacting with carbon dioxide as it was produced during microbial oxidation. This reaction would produce calcium carbonate, or limestone, which Severinghaus failed to find when he analyzed Biosphere II soil samples. Another possibility was that calcium carbonate could have been crystallizing as mineral "scale" on the inside of Biosphere's water pipes, just as it does in homes that have hard water, but when they cut into some of the pipes they were clean?no scale.

Next, he thought about leakage through the rubber membranes of the Biosphere, but that was ruled out based on calculations. The membranes were well studied and they knew the diffusion constant for CO2. From that, using the thickness of the membranes and the CO2 gradient across the membrane?the difference between the carbon dioxide concentrations inside and outside Biosphere II?they could actually calculate how much carbon dioxide would diffuse through the membrane. It was a trivial amount.

With every plausible theory dashed on the rocks of experimentation, Severinghaus got a critical tip from an unlikely source: his father, John Severinghaus, a high-altitude physiologist at the University of California at San Francisco. "I was just talking to my dad about all the dead ends I had hit and he said, 'What about the concrete? Maybe the concrete is absorbing the CO2' Sure enough, we took cores of concrete, analyzed them, and found that they were very rich in calcium carbonate, about ten times richer in calcium carbonate than concrete from outside the structure." And with nearly two football fields' worth of concrete surface exposed to the Biosphere II atmosphere, there was plenty opportunity for carbon dioxide to react with one of concrete's chemical components.

A concrete solution

Concrete is a mixture of sand and gravel held together by a binding agent, usually Portland cement. Portland cement is made by heating a powdered mixture of limestone, which is mostly calcium carbonate (CaCO3); clay, a mixture of aluminosilicates such as the mineral kaolinite (Al2Si2O5(OH)4); and sand, which is silicon dioxide, SiO2, to 1350 ?C in a rotating kiln. The result is a mixture of calcium silicates and calcium aluminates that when mixed with water produces calcium silicate hydrates and calcium hydroxide.

The calcium silicate hydrates contribute most of the strength to cement, but calcium hydroxide is the key ingredient in the missing carbon dioxide mystery. Carbon dioxide diffuses into the porous structure of concrete, then reacts with calcium hydroxide to form calcium carbonate and water.

Ca(OH)2 + CO2 --- CaCO3 + H2O

Under normal conditions, this reaction goes on slowly. But carbon dioxide concentrations in Biosphere II were 10-fold higher than normal, causing this reaction to proceed approximately 10 times faster than normal. In fact, in little more than 2 years, calcium carbonate had penetrated more than 2 cm into Biosphere II's concrete structures. With some 10,000 m2 of concrete exposed to the Biosphere II atmosphere, it is no longer a mystery where the 500,000-1,500,000 mol of carbon dioxide was hiding.

More concrete concerns

But that's not the end of the story. As the calcification of concrete occurs, water begins accumulating in the concrete. As carbon dioxide continues to diffuse into the concrete, some of it reacts with water to produce carbonic acid, releasing hydrogen ions.

CO2 + H2O --- H2CO3

H2CO3 --- H+ + HCO3-

HCO3- --- H+ + CO32-

This is worrisome because buried within the concrete are iron reinforcing bars, which give concrete structures their remarkable tensile strength, or ability to withstand bending and flexing. At the normal pH of concrete, around 8, iron will not corrode. The reaction above lowers the pH of concrete, however, and hydrogen ions will catalyze the corrosion of iron. At present, this is not a problem, because the iron is deep within the concrete. But the Biosphere II experiment is expected to continue for 100 years, during which time the calcium carbonate front would easily reach the reinforcing bars. At that point, the iron would begin to rust, the structure would lose strength, and Biosphere II would become unsafe. To head off this possibility, all the concrete surfaces within Biosphere II have now been painted with an impermeable coating.

Still searching

But there's still the question of what to do about the disappearing oxygen. Soil geochemist Eugene F. Kelly, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, has taken samples of Biosphere II's soils and says the fundamental problem is that they don't much resemble natural soils found in rain forests, savannas, and deserts. There's too much organic material in Biosphere II's soils, and so the problem of microbial oxidation is going to continue to be a problem for some time to come.

In the meantime, the decline in oxygen has slowed, perhaps because there is now less organic matter or because new lights in the agricultural areas may have boosted photosynthesis. For now, though, project managers will add oxygen as needed, while researchers such as Broecker and Kelly plan to use Biosphere II for scientific ends. "We want to understand how a functioning ecosystem processes carbon dioxide, oxygen, and other substances in Biosphere I," says Kelly. "This is a great experiment in progress."

just shows that earth's system isn't a simple as a looks...

[Cygnet]

What occurs to me is that this would make a great biosecure facility for ???

Leva