5%. Symptoms were prevelent enough to require the same kinds of injections one would get in high mountain climbing. The CO2, however, fluctuated daily probably because of a different manner in which drawdown during sunlight interacted with night respiration. The crew had to constantly monitor and tweak these levels, often by manipulating irrigation, cutting and storing biomass, and increasing or decreasing photosynthesis. Some thought that this unplanned fuxuation came about because of a series of microbial growth spurts in the soil (Marino and Odum, 1999).
The second stage of the experiment is what brought it to a close. It was scheduled to last from March 1994 to January 1995, but, because of a series of disputes between management, problems within the second crews dynamics, and members of the first crew violating the clsure rule, it was dissolved on September 6, 1994. Experts came into the facility and found that one ant species had almost dominated the ecosystem; wiping out the fertilizers, preying on birds, and more (Broad, 1996). Columbia University took over the project from 1995 to 2003, using it as a working lab for research on space flight research, planetary dynamics, and the effects of global warming (Arenson, 2003).
The question remains, however: was Biosphere 2 a failure? Certainly, it was a failed managerial attempt externally; certainly the second mission collapsing was a failure, but the project a failure -- hardly. In fact so much data has come out of the techniques used in Biosphere 2 that it can hardly be termed a scientific failure. First, we learned that, like chaos theory predicts, a system cannot be closed and not be expected to adapt in some way or another. Like trying to accurately predict the weather, predicting every single aspect of the moisture levels, the amount of sunlight (and who would know how many sunny days and at what intensity), or the way that minute soil bacteria would remove oxygen from the air, was practically impossible. This is an important lesson -- biomes are inordinately...
We do not always notice this because of the amount of air and
water that can cleanse our planet (Biosphere 1, even massive structures are unable to perform the same way. Second, a tremendous amount of data same out of the project in reference to human psychological adaptation; low caloric diets; division of labor. Finally, the biggest lesson from Biosphere 2 is that humans are not quite ready to plan a new system that is sustainable without some sort of
intervention on a regular basis.
REFERENCES
Arenson, K. (2003, September 9). Columbia University Ends Its Association With Biosphere 2. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from The New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E7D6173BF93AA3575AC0A9659C8B63
Broad, W. (1996, November 19).
Paradise Lost: Biosphere Retooled as Atmospheric Nightmare. Retrieved September 18, 2010, from The New York Times: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2D9133AF93AA25752C1A960958260
Erickson, M. (2005). Science,
Culture, and
Society. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Marino and Odum. (1999). Biosphere 2: Research Past and Present. Burlington, MA: Elsevier.
Nelon, Burgess, Alling, Alvarez-Romo, Dempster, Walford and Allen. (1993, April). Using a Closed Ecological System to Study Earth's Biosphere. BioScience, 43(4), 225-36.
Nelson and Dempster. (1996). Living in Space: Results from Biosphere 2's Initial Closure: An Early Testbed for Closed Ecological Systems on
Mars. American Astronautical Society, 86(2), 95-488.
Poynter, J. (2006). The Human Experiment. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
Shea, T. (2005). Biosphere 2: Solving World Problems.…
