The ocean biome is only one section of a 3.15-acre greenhouse, the world's biggest such controlled experimental site. There is also an equatorial rainforest, desert, savannah, marsh, and a three-chambered, managed forest. With an annual operating budget of about $17 million, much of it for energy costs, B2C is in the midst of a high-stakes struggle to remake itself as an environmental sciences research leader.
The facility's much-publicized original efforts of the 1990s--to provide a self-sustaining environment for human "biospherians," in part as an experimental precursor to colonizing space--have been replaced by a research focus on the effects of changing carbon dioxide (CO2) levels and temperature on ecosystems. The complex's original estimated construction price tag of $150 million, funded by Texas billionaire Ed Bass, has been supplemented by millions more in physical restructuring ever since Columbia University made B2C its western campus in 1996. Late last year, Columbia launched a ...
