Biosphere 2

Brooke's Kindergarten class got to visit Bioshpere 2.
It was very cool to see! Here are a few pictures from our visit.

At a size comparable to two and a half football fields, it was the largest closed system ever created. The sealed nature of the structure allowed scientists to monitor the ever-changing chemistry of the air, water and soil contained within. The health of the human crew was continuously monitored by a medical team.
Inside was a rainforest, an 850 square meter ocean with a coral reef, a 450 square meter mangrove wetlands, a 1900 square meter savannah grassland, a 1400 square meter fog desert, a 2500 square meter agricultural system, a human habitat with living quarters and office, and a below-ground level technical facility. Heating and cooling water circulated through independent piping systems, and electrical power was supplied from a natural gas energy center through airtight penetrations.

The tour begins in the human habitat. Here you will see one of the apartments where the Biospherians lived, the farm area where they grew their crops and the kitchen where they cooked their meals. Your guide will then lead you through the airlock door into the wilderness areas of Biosphere 2 where you will experience firsthand the environments of this engineering marvel. You first enter the tropical savanna. The trail system then travels along the 40-foot ocean cliff where you look down into the million gallon tropical ocean. As you move along the trail, you descend into the lower savanna along the mangrove through the tropical thorn scrub and into the coastal fog desert. From the desert, you now go into the technosphere. The technosphere is where mechanical systems make control of the Biosphere 2 environments possible. You then descend through a tunnel into one of two lungs. The lungs are large geodesic domes that originally prevented Biosphere 2 from exploding or imploding.

Rainforest

A banana tree

This is the end of our tour in the lung. It was really cool to see how all of the things worked behind the scenes.