Biosphere 2

Mona's sister Vera and Frank left this morning.  After they left, Barry and I headed to the Biosphere 2.

This my first good look at the Biosphere as we went down the access road to it.

The University of Arizona runs the facility now and they have added buildings to create a campus.

This is the entrance to the biosphere, there is an airlock located there that everything had to go through.

The tour guide we had was great, he had been on the project since the start and gave us lots of insights to what happened.  This is the third time Barry has been on the tour and he learned a lot from this guide.

The Tropical Rain Forest was really something to see!  Barry commented that you almost expected Tarzan to come swinging by on the vines.

The tour was a mile long, up and down stairs, it covered lots of different areas.  This is the beach of their ocean, there is a wave generator at the other end.

After the ocean talk, we went down these stairs to the desert area.  There was a marsh area, but the guide told us it got away from them and became overgrown.

The basement was next, all the heating and cooling equipment was located there.  It costs about a half a million dollars a year to heat and cool the Biosphere.

From the basement, we went down a tunnel to the South Lung.

There are two lungs, they use a large weight on top of a diaphragm to keep the air pressure in the Biosphere constant when the air temperature changes.  We had to go out through that door in the wall and you wanted to hold onto your hat because there was lots of air blowing out of the chamber.

Then we had to go up this flight of steps to get back to the Biosphere.  I made it without any trouble and felt pretty good about that because it has been a while since I have walked.

At the top was the end of the guided tour, then we were free to go where we wanted.  I wanted Barry in this picture so you could get an idea of how big this place is.

This is part of a crew member's apartment, there was a spiral staircase going up to what we figured was a bedroom.









This is the crew's dining and kitchen areas.

Most of the Biosphere was built using this type of bolt together structure.  It was a very interesting tour and I really enjoyed it!