Kastle's Journey: Catalina State Park, Tucson and Biosphere 2 Nov 21

As our next campsite is only a 90 minute drive today, Ray headed out for sunrise shots at the Willcox Playa Wildlife Area. We can see flocks of Sandhill Cranes flying overhead so knew they are there. He ended up with only one picture of the golf course. lol The main parking area is a hike to any water and with no sounds from cranes, Ray only hiked a quarter mile and turned around. He noticed a "binocular" sign close to town and Google showed it as a "Crane Viewing Area" and tried there. Still no sign of Sandhills, so just this one pic.

Twin Lakes Golf Course

As usual, we hit the road earlier than we needed to, 9 am. It took us about an hour and 3/4 to get to Catalina State Park which is early for check in (2 PM). Our site is still occupied, so we parked in the horse parking area and took the car into town for lunch. Red Lobster, yumm. It's been 8 years since we were last at Catalina and boy the little shopping centre at the road to the park is huge now.

Back at camp for 1pm and after set up we spent the afternoon outside enjoying the warm 66F day. And guess what Dianne .... no wind. :)

Our View.

Ray headed out at 4 to investigate for sunset pictures, no nice pink rocks yet.

No water in the wash.

Lots of material that came onto the road in the August wet season.

Tuesday we were out the door at 8:30 am heading to the Biosphere 2. What a fascinating place.

The tour is 50% outside and 50% inside. You download an audio tour and begin.

Property History:

Once a Native American hunting ground, this area has served numerous owners over the last 150 years. Before it became Biosphere 2 the land was used as a ranch, a home, a training institute and more. In 1979 a land swap occureed between Motorola and the University of Arizona Foundation and fully transferred in 1984 to the founders of the Biosphere 2.

The goal was to design an enclosed facility that simulates environments and demonstrates the interconnectedness of humans to their environment. The first experiment, known as the "mission" lasted from September 1991 to September 1993 in which four men and four women lived inside Biosphere 2. It was an outstanding success in engineering terms but fell short as a sustainable system.

During the first experiment, a challenge they faced was the imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide due to the abundance of microbes living in the rich organic soil of the rainforest and farm areas. As a result for safety, additional oxygen was added on day 500 of the 730 day mission. Following the end of the first mission a shorter second mission was carried out from 1993 to 1994.

Now the site is used for many experiments focusing on climate change. I believe the University of Arizona has 50 partners all doing different climate research in this facility.

Originally all the greenhouses were built to be able to feed them indefinitely. They had built an area for some pigs and chickens but never used it. One of their experiments was to grow coffee beans so they could make it themselves but it proved too hard so had to limit themselves to coffee once a week.

I tried to put the pictures in the order of the audio tour. lol The picture below is in the parking lot before we entered.

"ET Call Home!"

After setting up the audio tour, this is the picture of the site at the overlook.

The courtyard before going down into the Biosphere.

Below, the tallest dome is their library accessed by a long spiral staircase. The dome to the right is one of the "lungs" for the biosphere. They found that with all of the CO2 produced from the plants and people they needed to depressurize the place so the windows did not "blow out". There are 2 of them.

Down on the lawn a wild turkey grazed. I guess he felt safe as the Biospherians were all vegetarians. lol

Some people refer to the rainforests as “Earth’s lungs”. In reality this is quite far from the truth, as rainforests actually contribute little (net) oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere; 70% of oxygen production is done by water-bourne green algae and the cyanobacteria present in every habitat on Earth.

Biosphere 2, a sealed ecological system built in Arizona to study the interaction between different forms of life and as a test of the possibility of using closed systems in space colonisation, also had lungs.

Biosphere 2’s oxygen came from the facility’s six biomes: a 1900 square meter rainforest, an 850 square meter “ocean”, a 450 square meter mangrove wetland, a 1300 square meter savannah grassland, a 1400 square meter fog desert and a 2500 square meter agricultural system.

During the day the heat of the Arizona sun would cause the air inside the facility to expand. In order to avoid the large pressure difference that this would create (5000 Pa, or 5% of standard atmospheric pressure), Biosphere 2’s creators included two giant hemispherical “lungs”.

As the air inside the facility expanded it would flow through underground tunnels into the lungs. Each lung contained a large weight hanging from a rubber sheet; as the air expanded during the day the increased pressure would raise the weight into the air. In the evening, as the air cooled, the weight would pull the rubber sheet back down and push air back into the facility, thereby equalising any pressure difference as it appeared.

The Human Habitat is a 25,000 square foot, five story structure where the Biospherians prepared and ate their meals and lived in their own two story apartments.

There hi-tech communal kitchen.

Picture from Google

The original team of Biospherians.

The stairs up to the rarely used library due to the 250 steps to get up there and the low oxygen levels in the Biosphere.

Agrivoltaics: Growing Food and Making Energy.

Their Sonoron Desert positioned elevated solar panels over an understory of plants in a hot arid landscape,

The plants, protected by the solar panels from the worst of the midday sun's rays, become little evaporative coolers on the landscape. They take up carbon for photosynthesis by opening up their pores, or stomata, while letting water escape from their leaves which create a cooler microclimate.
The solar panels modules can lose efficiency while operating under the blazing Sonoran sun. Thanks to the cooler microclimate created by the plants, the panels perform at a higher level. The panels in turn protect the plants from sunburn and dehydration. The end results in a better crop yield and more efficient performance of the solar panels.

Who Knew! and of course they had solar trackers.

Triangle building is the rainforest.

Next stop is LEO (Landscape Evolution Observatory). Currently there are no plants planted on the surface. This experiment was to find out what happens to water once it goes underground. How does societal impacts change the quality of the water. Three structures, 100 feet long by 30 feet wide. This area was originally built to house livestock for the mission but they never did get to that point.

Nothing planted yet on the black surface you can see through the glass.

The rounded buildings shown in the above picture are the power plants that also contain two huge back up generators, one powered by diesel and one powered by natural gas, the premise being that if one fuel source is hard to come by, they had another. They would need these if there is a power problem because the Biosphere would heat up and be deadly in 40 minutes under the Sonoran sun without the air conditioning.

Next to them are the cooling towers. They are used to cool air by drawing air across a column of water.

They also have an orchard as they did not have any processed sugar in their diets. Most of their sweet cravings were satiated by eating the many varieties of fruit they had grown inside the Orchard, the Rainforest and the Savanna. Bananas, figs, grapes, lemon, lime, oranges and grapefruit. Guavas, apples, taro, coffee, sugar cane, cacao, star fruits, and kumquats were all grown here.

After coming out of this building, we went into the Desert. This desert is designed to simulate a Coastal fog desert, which is a type of desert that adaped to enviornments with higher levels of humidity than our local Sonoran Desert. Due to a tropical rainforest and ocean being located within the lab this was possible. Coastal fog deserts experience erratic winter rainfall and summer droughts.

Next is the Mangroves section, These grow in salt water in intertidal zones where sediments accumulate, wave action is absent and the soils have very little oxygen. These forests are incredibly important ecosystems; they protect against coastal erosion, filter heavy metals and pollutants from the water and support many species of wildlife and marine organisms.

Moving through the Mangroves we came upon the ocean. This is the world's largest experimental ocean at 700,000 gallons of saltwater. The ocean originally housed a tropical coral reef sourced from the Yucatan peninsula and proved largely successful during the original missions but in 1996 when Columbia took over management of the facility they focused on the impacts of increased atmospheric C02 on coral reef ecosystems and discovered a direct negative impact on the corals. After that experiment concluded and Columbia left the facility in 2003 the Ocean system was neglected and the remaining corals died off.

Currently the Ocean biome is undergowing a three phase renovation to bring it back to a healthy coral reef once again so it can be studied with the current world situation where 50% of the Great Barrier Reef has been lost. There was a team working on it while we were there.

The Savanna biome runs lengthwise across the Biosphere 2's structure along a cliff. A transistion zone between the Coastal Fog Desert and the Rainforest part of the stucture. Specific plants were planted here that would produce seedpods and berries to feed the birds that they intended to introduce but never did.

Picture from Google

Next we went through the triangle building which houses the Rainforest. You can really feel the humidity in this area. I actually got dripped on several times. They have a research group and one member hung from a chair up in the canopy of the trees studying it. The rock mountain even has a small waterfall coming out of the top of it.