From a distance, Biosphere 2 emerges from the cacti and creosote of the Sonoran desert like a gleaming oasis, a colony of glass and bright white structures. Despite being just outside Tucson, Arizona, it looks almost like a colony on another planet.
When one of the facility’s 100,000 annual visitors steps inside, they see a whole world – from a tropical rainforest, glistening in 50 shades of green and teeming with life, to a miniature, experimental ocean. Toward the end of the tour, the visitor comes to a comparatively barren-looking experiment called the Landscape Evolution Observatory, where life is struggling to establish itself on crushed volcanic rock originally spewed from an ancient Arizonan volcano.
