Biosphere 2

Saturday, March 11, 2017 - Amado, AZ

We have talked about going to Biosphere 2 for several months now, so we decided we would go today.  On the way we saw this motorcycle that was for sale and looked just like Jess's old, so we had to take a couple of pictures and send them to Jess.

Biosphere 2 is an Earth systems science research facility located in Oracle, Arizona.  It is currently owned by the University of Arizona, but it has gone through a couple of owners of the years it has existed.  It was a perfect day to go.

After we paid to take the tour we headed to where the tour starts.  As we walked down there you pass some housing for visiting groups.

Then you see the outside of the different buildings on the campus.

There are several different environments.  This is the ocean. It used to be a living part of a reef, but there were a couple of years when the buildings were not maintained and the reef died.  They are now letting it get saltier, so it will match the water in the Baja of California.

Next we went into the tropical rain forest.  They currently do not have any projects going on in this area.

Our tour guide was one of the people that was involved in the second mission.  He was only at the mission as a consultant and only in the Biosphere for a week, but he was able to give us a prospective that I had not thought about.  I thought the mission was a complete failure, but it wasn't and they got a lot of good information from it.  The website contains a lot of good information about this facility.

We eventually got to the desert environment.  They are not currently working on any experiments in this area either.  There are several areas that they are working on and I feel like now that the University of Arizona owns it, it will continue to be a very nice research facility.

Next he took us under the desert area to see the ventilation and mechanical area.  It was very windy walking down the hallway.

Then we went to the lung, which was used to equalize the pressure between inside the Biosphere and outside.  It was very windy going in and out of it.  This was the tunnel down to the lung.

 This is the lung.  The air is holding the structure up. Our guide did let out some of the air which caused the structure to lower. The echo made it hard to understand our guide.

This is what the lung looks like from the outside.

Here is another building on the complex.

At this point the guide let us go in our own direction to explore the campus.  Mike and I went down to the viewing area of the ocean.

We did explore the buildings a little more before leaving.  This is the view on our drive home.

We stopped at Chuy's for dinner.

It was a very good dinner and we got to see the moon rise over the mountain.  It was awesome.

It was another wonderful day!