In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing

In 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside a glass world in the Arizona desert for two years, and the experiment nearly unravelled when the oxygen began disappearing from the air they were breathing

The Biosphere 2 oxygen problem is easy to remember as a failure: eight people sealed under glass, the air thinning around them, and a dream of self-contained living suddenly meeting chemistry it had not fully accounted for. That is too simple. In September 1991, four men and four women entered Biosphere 2, a 3.14-acre research facility in Oracle, Arizona, built as a materially closed ecological system. The University of Arizona, which now owns t…