Artificial dome world set for largest indoor weather experiment
By Anna Nowogrodzki
This summer Biosphere 2, the glassed-in ecosystem in the Arizona desert, will go with the flow. The largest-ever experiment to study how water moves through the landscape is set to start there next month.
Water is clearly vital to life, but so are the minerals and nutrients it picks up as it flows through rocks and soil. This process, called weathering, underlies everything else in an ecosystem, including microbes, plants, animals, agriculture and how the landscape changes over time.
All the calcium, potassium and magnesium we eat originated from rocks, says Jean Dixon, a geomorphologist at Montana State University in Bozeman.
“Chemical weathering is the first thing you need in order to form a habitable planet,” says Dixon. But the process is still not well understood.
That’s where Biosphere 2 comes in.
The experiment will begin with three hills weighing 500,000 kilograms each, made from crushed basalt – a volcanic rock. Every three days, researchers will turn on the taps to make it rain equally on all three hills. Then they will observe exactly where the water goes.
The artificial hills are studded with more than 1800 embedded sensors, which measure anything from carbon dioxide levels to water content.
Watching it flow
Isotope-labelled molecules of hydrogen, lithium bromide and lithium chloride mixed into the rain will allow the scientists to trace individual molecules at much greater resolution than ever before.
After a year of studying just soil and water, they will add plants, says Peter Troch, science director at Biosphere 2.
Dixon has one concern – that one year without living things might not be enough to see much. “Weathering often takes place over thousands of years,” she says. Still, the experiment will be a vast improvement on what we already know, she says.
Scientists have studied weathering in the laboratory, but at much smaller scales. Weathering is always many times slower when they measure it in the real world at large scales, says Troch, and no one knows exactly why.
Researchers hope this experiment will be able to find out because it’s carefully controlled, and at a real-world scale. And a deeper knowledge of the water under our feet will become more important as climate change leads to more droughts and flooding around the world.
This summer Biosphere 2, the glassed-in ecosystem in the Arizona desert, will go with the flow. The largest-ever experiment to study how water moves through the landscape is set to start there next month.
Water is clearly vital to life, but so are the minerals and nutrients it picks up as it flows through rocks and soil. This process, called weathering, underlies everything else in an ecosystem, including microbes, plants, animals, agriculture and how the landscape changes over time.
All the calcium, potassium and magnesium we eat originated from rocks, says Jean Dixon, a geomorphologist at Montana State University in Bozeman.
“Chemical weathering is the first thing you need in order to form a habitable planet,” says Dixon. But the process is still not well understood.
That’s where Biosphere 2 comes in.
The experiment will begin with three hills weighing 500,000 kilograms each, made from crushed basalt – a volcanic rock. Every three days, researchers will turn on the taps to make it rain equally on all three hills. Then they will observe exactly where the water goes.
The artificial hills are studded with more than 1800 embedded sensors, which measure anything from carbon dioxide levels to water content.
Watching it flow
Isotope-labelled molecules of hydrogen, lithium bromide and lithium chloride mixed into the rain will allow the scientists to trace individual molecules at much greater resolution than ever before.
After a year of studying just soil and water, they will add plants, says Peter Troch, science director at Biosphere 2.
Dixon has one concern – that one year without living things might not be enough to see much. “Weathering often takes place over thousands of years,” she says. Still, the experiment will be a vast improvement on what we already know, she says.
Scientists have studied weathering in the laboratory, but at much smaller scales. Weathering is always many times slower when they measure it in the real world at large scales, says Troch, and no one knows exactly why.
Researchers hope this experiment will be able to find out because it’s carefully controlled, and at a real-world scale. And a deeper knowledge of the water under our feet will become more important as climate change leads to more droughts and flooding around the world.
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