Remember the movie Bio-Dome that stared Paulie Shore and Stephen Baldwin, and was all about two guys who in an attempt to impress their girlfriends were locked inside a Biosphere with acclaimed scientists for a year? Now the real thing is coming to life well, minus those two idiots.
Scientists will use the 7.2-million-square-foot facility that in the 1990’s was used by Jane Poynter and seven other individuals—in order to help figure out ways in which the human race can survive even with elevated levels of heat.
Workers will start working on "B2" next month by building the first of three enclosed soil slopes in the "intensive agriculture biome," a press release stated. This is the area where Shore and Baldwin held a party in the BioSphere, essentially destroying the outcome of the experiment.
"What makes me really happy is that it really does capture a lot of what we were trying to do in the early years of Biosphere 2," Poynter, who founded an aerospace company with husband and fellow biospherian Taber MacCallum, told The Associated Press (News - Alert). "I mean, they're doing some world-class science. They really have the vision of the place. They understand what it was intended for in many ways."
The aptly titled "Land Evolution Observatory" will help scientists visualize how certain factors such as vegetation and topography can affect the journey that rainwater must follow until it reaches our drinking supplies.
Counterculture ecologist John Polk Allen and Edward Perry Bass co-founded Biosphere 2. The facility is located at SunSpace Ranch and contains five very different types of ecosystems including a wetland, tropical rain forest, savanna grassland, coastal fog desert, and an impressive 600,000-gallon "ocean" that even comes with its own wave-lapped sand beach and living coral reef.
The building has 52 tanks that collect up to 5,000 gallons of water from the air each day and then dispersed it back into the various biomes acting as rain. Two massive domed "lungs" protect the building at all times, from exploding or imploding as outside temperatures continue to vary.
Matt Adamson, senior education and outreach coordinator, said in a statement, “Researchers are in the middle of a survey of all plant life inside Biosphere 2, and they have already come across one species of palm-like cycad that is currently an endangered plant in the outside world.
"Some people imagine a scenario where Biosphere might almost be an ark of plants," Adamson told AP. "As they potentially become endangered in the real world, we'll have viable, healthy specimens in here."
The Biosphere2 facility has about 100,000 visitors to the site every year.
