Explainer: What manmade biospheres can tell us about climate change

Over 30 years ago, a group of eight hippy-turned theatre troupe-turned sustainability enthusiasts voluntarily entered a manmade biosphere for a two-year period.

What was once deemed a failed experiment is one of humankind’s most famous attempts to recreate an Earth-like environment, but one that is now providing research opportunities to better study planetary health.

Biosphere 2 was designed to mimic what its creators described as Biosphere 1 – the Earth. A biosphere is essentially a collection of Earth’s ecosystems and, accordingly, Biosphere 2 had its own ocean, rainforest, mangrove swamp, farm and savanna. It remains the world’s largest mesocosm – an outdoor experimental system simulating the natural environment under controlled conditions.

Biosphere 2 is located in Arizona, but the roots of this type of research belong to Russian geochemist and mineralogist, Vladimir I. Vernadsky, whose pioneering work helped shape his country’s space programme in the 1950-60s.

The first sealed experiment took place in 1965 in Siberia when algae was used to recycle air humans had breathed. By the 1970s, the Russians were sending two to three people at a time to man the Bios-3 facility (a 315 cubic metre-sized ‘controlled ecological life support system’) for up to six months.

By contrast, Biosphere 2 was a mammoth undertaking, and perhaps its size (standing at more than 3 acres), along with the fact that those living in it were not trained scientists, explains the media’s derision.

That the biospherians were self-educated in sustainability is true, but this doesn’t detract from the legacy of knowledge that their two-year experiment in modelling life systems and subsequent research at the facility have bequeathed planetary science.

What Biosphere 2 and its successors have in common is a visionary element, charismatic characters and wealthy supporters. Biosphere 2 was the brainchild of metallurgist and former Harvard MBA graduate, John P Allen, who turned his hand to many things before creating a theatre group with the aim of changing the world.

As part of this, the troupe built a boat, using it to visit and study different types of ecosystems before returning to the US, where billionaire businessman and philanthropist Ed Bass bankrolled a project to replicate these under a series of vast domes in the desert.

Meanwhile in Utah, struck by the idea of life on the red planet, the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) attracts individuals from throughout the world, who live, work and conduct experiments under Mars-like conditions, in a donation-supported project whose backers include Elon Musk.

Elsewhere ‘habitats’ have been created in a disused clay pit at the UK’s Eden Project (although not a closed system it offers a unique research facility as well as visitor attraction), in a Hawaiian volcano (the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation) with the support of the University of Hawaii and NASA, and the Astroland Interplanetary Agency based in a Spanish cave. Alongside this, specific habitats have been recreated to support scientific research, including Australia’s National Sea Simulator.

Typically, space, the desire and, in some cases, belief in the necessity to colonize other worlds has spurred on research, but Biosphere 2, and to a lesser extent, Bios-3 and the Eden Project, provide the opportunity to research the ecosystems of our existing planet.

Manmade ecosystems highlight many things, including how difficult it is to replicate what we have on Earth. Another key aspect is the symbiotic relationship between everything within an ecosystem.

As one of the original eight biospherians, Mark Nelson, said: “Every time you breathe, these plants are waiting for your CO2. They are your third lung. I thought, ‘My God, this is keeping me alive! I am absolutely, metabolically connected to the life here.’”

Findings from these attempts to marshal bioregenerative systems include:

Biosphere 2's lofty ideals now seem prescient; the goal was to study how its ecosystems developed, and to learn how humans and their technologies can harmonize with the rest of nature.

This is vital in an era of planetary tipping points. As these are met, exceeded and, in rare instances, receded from, questions about the role of these planetary systems, as well as interrelationship between humans and different ecosystems come to the fore.

For several years, Biosphere 2 fell from favour, its management taken on by Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to President Donald Trump, who closed it, swiftly ending a hoped-for 100-year lifespan. From 1996 to 2003, Columbia University served as the managing institution for Biosphere 2. In 2007, the University of Arizona assumed management and in 2011, the facility was formally donated to the University of Arizona.

As a closed system, it provides something of a super-charged environment, enabling scientists to make radical and swift changes to an ecosystem to see how species and plants fare. As Biosphere 2’s deputy director and chief operating officer, John Adams, states: “The facility’s design enables measurement of processes ranging from seconds to decades and from microscopic scales to whole-ecosystem dynamics.”

Scientists have planted different types of trees to see how crops like cacao and coffee fare in a changing environment. They’re also using the facility to study water, specifically rain, run-off, absorption and evaporation and, separately, as a means to map ocean viruses to better understand ocean microbial photosynthesis.

Research findings have been wide-ranging; those related to trees reveal that they are surprisingly tolerant of physical heat, and under drought conditions release greater amounts of the compounds needed to seed rain clouds. Some species become brittle, revealing that wind helps strengthen tree branches, much like weight bearing exercises strengthen human bones.

Adams suggests that “capability to disentangle drivers of ecosystem change makes [Biosphere 2] uniquely suited to advancing predictive models of Earth system responses under future climate scenarios".

In this respect, Biosphere 2 was ahead of its time, and it is only in recent years that from this bold – and, depending on your outlook, either visionary or deranged – experiment we’ve come to more fully appreciate the value of mesocosm research on this scale.