ORACLE, Ariz. – Jane Poynter and seven compatriots agreed to spend two years sealed inside a 3-acre terrarium in the Sonoran Desert. Their mission back in the 1990s: To see whether humans might someday be able to create self-sustaining colonies in outer space.
Two decades later, the only creatures inhabiting Biosphere 2 are cockroaches, nematodes, snails, crazy ants and assorted fish. Scientists are still using the 7.2-million-square-foot facility, only now the focus is figuring out how we’ll survive on our own warming planet.
Next month, workers will begin a new chapter for “B2″ — building the first of three enclosed soil slopes in what was once the “intensive agricultural biome,” the space where Poynter and the other original “biospherians” grew the rice, sorghum, peanuts, bananas, papayas, sweet potatoes and lablab beans that supplied 90 percent of their nutritional needs.
The new “Land Evolution Observatory” — a 10-year, $5 million project — will help scientists learn how vegetation, topography and other factors affect rainwater’s journey through a watershed and into our drinking supplies.
“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,” says Poynter, who founded an
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