Tucson Day Date
Alayna’s last volleyball game was down in Tucson so Jared and I decided to squeeze in a little day date together.💙
We dropped her off at school and then we headed over to the Hangar Café for breakfast.
It’s a small little place with a diner type feel. The food was ok. Not somewhere we’ll go again. However, you can watch planes come and go while you eat. So that’s fun!
Then we drove down to check out the Biosphere 2 in Oracle. That was pretty cool!
As we listened to the app and did the self guided tour we learned a lot about this experiment these 8 scientists lived in for two years and in isolation. I couldn’t help but notice the intertwining of the things these men and women endured in lock-down and how we as a global community lived in the Pandemic the last year+.
Living on this half acre growing their own food, taking care of the animals, recording data and all that was required for the day to day took a large toll on them. They weren’t able to meet their caloric needs and lost a lot of weight.
“Even more dangerous was the decline in oxygen. In 1992, their oxygen levels dipped temporarily, but overall their oxygen levels declined from 20.9 percent to 14.5 percent. (Any environment below 19.5 percent oxygen is defined as oxygen-deficient by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA.) The low oxygen made them lethargic. For months they couldn’t sleep properly because it gave them sleep apnea. Scientists were monitoring them and communicating with them from the outside, and finally in August 1993, just a month before the crew left Biosphere 2, they decided to start pumping in oxygen.
Later, scientists figured out that the culprits were microbes proliferating in the Biosphere’s compost-rich soil, combined with the building’s concrete. The microbes themselves were not harmful, but they converted oxygen into carbon dioxide, which then reacted with the building’s concrete to form calcium carbonate and irreversibly remove oxygen molecules from the Biosphere’s atmosphere.” – https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/81553/how-living-inside-biosphere-2-changed-these-scientists-lives
This lead to them needing to pump oxygen into the dome but they tried to keep it a secret. Once word got out it discredited a lot of what they were trying to do there. Sad really.
The next experiment they ran they had 7 scientists instead of an even number of 8. Apparently when you have an even number it makes for a lot of drama and taking sides as it were. With no one to make tie breaking votes etc. I know they learned so much about plants, the planet, and ecosystems but honestly I found the human aspect of this so much more interesting!!
The rainforest area was my favorite. It was so lush and beautiful!
I’m glad we went. It was fun to do something different and learn something new.
After we left the Biosphere we headed to Tucson and grabbed lunch at a place several people recommended called Mi Nadito. A lot of presidents and famous people have eaten there and have their photos on the wall. However, Jared and I were not impressed. Food on this day never really worked out for us. But we tried to make the best of it. 😛
To end the day we headed to Vail and watched Alayna’s final game of the season.
We love to watch her play!
