Roy was cook’s helper for the day and began helping Taber by washing pots, making tea, and setting the table in the frequently frantic last minutes before meals were served. Gaie, Mark and Sally, hungrily anticipating dinner, took the opportunity to work on this book, which they’d been writing since the early days of the experiment.
Taber and Roy served dinner at 6:45 PM. Taber made one of his characteristically beautiful meals, featuring a flour shell into which he placed delicious chili with lablab beans, chives, taro, and green banana. There were sliced beets, a mixed vegetable dish, baked sweet potatoes with a banana sauce, and tossed salad. Dessert was sweet potato pie topped with slices of fresh fig.
Less than an hour later, Taber and Roy were doing the kitchen cleanup, which included sweeping and mopping the floor. They cooked the day’s food scraps in a large pot on the electric stove, and these leftovers were now ready to go down to feed the goats. Taber started on the next day’s breakfast. He began slow cooking the porridge overnight in a crock pot, and preparing rolls and sweet potato patties on baking sheets in the refrigerator along with other foods for tomorrow’s lunch.
Sally and Laser worked together in the command room summarizing the day’s events in the captain’s log and sent it via the network to Mission Control and SBV management. At 8:15, Mark started his night rounds—a twenty-to-thirty-minute tour through the agriculture, rainforest, savannah, and desert, noting the manual thermometer readings in each area. He also turned off whatever lights that had been left on, and then checked the algae scrubber room, the recirculating fans, and the wave machine in the ocean. He also glanced at the alarm screen in the savannah tunnel for any temperature red alerts, and then checked another alarm board nearby for any yellow lights indicating technical malfunctions. He then copied his readings in a logbook which was kept near the alarm screen monitor.
Linda settled in with her computer to log onto the WELL, a communications network run by the Whole Earth Catalogue. She checked a general bulletin board for useful information and examined WELL’s array of electronic conferences. Linda frequently contributed to conferences on Biosphere 2, as well as many others on politics, the environment, and cutting-edge technologies. Roy was on the phone with friends in Los Angeles. Taber and Jane were watching TV, and Gaie was reading.
Our apartments were our castles. When we wanted to be alone, that is where we’d retreat. Each biospherian had a two-story apartment with a downstairs area that includes desk, bookshelves, TV/VCR and radio/CD/tape player, sofa and easy chair, and clothes closet. Up a circular staircase is the loft bedroom with a clothes bureau. There were ten apartments in Biosphere 2, the extra two were allocated for visiting scientists who may use them in the future.
Before closure, the crew had the opportunity to decorate their ‘pads’ with whatever they wanted. So, we had our favorite paintings, souvenirs from travels around the world, books, and music collections. We also chose rooms with views that we liked—though all the views were out of this world. Some looked out over the agriculture area and south to the Santa Catalina Mountains, others looked out over the ridge to the west and were good for sunset-watchers. Some had a view of the area in front of the habitat, where gleaming, white tents sprung up during special events at Biosphere 2.
Laser transformed his apartment into a video studio with gear for making documentary films. A piece of blue plastic in his window mystified visitors until he explained that he was protecting his equipment from harsh sunlight. Linda decked out her apartment with beautiful artifacts from native cultures around the world. Roy’s apartment was decorated with art pieces from artist friends. Mark’s was dominated by his huge library of books, Australian Aboriginal carvings, and colorful paintings.
Most of the crew kept a personal record of their experiences, and before turning in at about 9:15, Mark made his daily entry in his computer. Others kept long-hand notebooks. By 10:00 PM, the hallways of the habitat were dark, although light seeped out from under the doors of a few apartments.
For all eight of us, another day of the 731 days we would spend in Biosphere 2 had come to a close. As we drifted into sleep, our world continued to hum around, above, and beneath us. Almost all of the crew have remarked upon the special intensity of dreams inside Biosphere 2, but no one noted any particularly unusual dream that night. A few of us may have noticed the sliver of the new moon rising outside, refracting through the beautiful geometric glass sky of our miniature world.
Nestled in the foothills of the Santa Catalina mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, the 3.15 acres Biosphere 2 facility is the world’s largest closed ecological system. Inside are tropical rainforest, savannah, desert, mangrove marsh, coral reef biomes, a half-acre farm, and human living area.
Schematic of Biosphere 2, built for one hundred years of operation, each of its biomes covered about half an acre and with deep soil/sediment tanks that were lined with stainless steel below ground and airtight space frame roofs above. The white geodesic domes covered its two variable volume “lungs” which allowed the facility’s air to expand and contract without damaging the structure.
Biosphere 2’s Mission Control housed a key part of the facility’s “Nerve System,” allowing outside scientists and IT specialists access to the data being collected.
Biosphere 2’s operation required the expertise of many scientists and engineers. A sophisticated real-time data and sensor computer network, state-of-the-art for its time, facilitated the flow of information to and from the facility.
Taber in the Analytic Laboratory in Biosphere 2. The lab used no toxic chemicals and was equipped to make very detailed analyses of our air and water.
In addition to automatic sensors distributed around Biosphere 2, hand-collected samples of air, water, biomass, and soil were gathered for periodic analysis and to augment research studies. Here, air samples are collected in the savannah.
Biosphere 2’s constructed coral reef included around three dozen coral species, of which only one was lost during the experiment. Its operation yielded important insights into the potential impacts of climate change on ocean health.
This map of the coral reef was done within two weeks of the end of the two-year closure. Living stony coral species are colored, with thin black lines representing seagrasses. Black colors represent dead colonies of all species. Depth was measured to generate a bathymetric contour map which was digitized and merged with the coral file to generate the final image.
Several times a week, Gaie dove in the Biosphere 2 ocean to garden the corals and inspect the health of the reef.
The coral reef biome involved daily management and careful observation which included measurements of ocean water chemistry, weeding algae to remove nutrients, maintaining the pumps, wave machine,