Columbia University on Monday (September 8) announced that, effective December 22, its researchers would leave the troubled Biosphere 2. Columbia will cut its 7-year ties to the Oracle, Ariz., facility as part of the settlement of a lawsuit against them by Biosphere 2's owners, Decisions Investments Corporation.

The suit, filed in March, claimed that Columbia had failed to hire six full-time research faculty members, ended plans to build a new lab, and cut financial backing of the facility. Columbia sends approximately 200 students each year to Biosphere 2 to attend classes and conduct research with the resident scientists, but all educational programs will be discontinued at the end of this semester. Columbia has also requested that all research equipment, including custom-made instruments, be returned to the university by the end of this year.

What will happen next is uncertain. "Right now, we're turning our attention to exploring viable options for the future use and operation of the facility," Terrell Lamb, a spokesperson for DIC, told The Scientist. "Any other comments about the future of research at Biosphere 2 would be pure speculation at this point."

Small-scale research could continue under new management; the airtight seal could be restored and the entire facility returned to its original state in order to study interactions between ecosystems; or the structure could be torn down. And "even in stripped-down form," John Allen, inventor and one of the three original architects of Biosphere 2, told The Scientist, the facility is still "light years ahead" of any other facility of its kind.

"Most of the research projects in Biosphere 2 cannot be done any place else," Charles Barry Osmond, Biosphere 2's former president and executive director, said via email. "Whether other US or international support can remobilize research in Biosphere 2, research after Columbia depends on many factors, presumably most of all on the willingness of the owner to reengage," Osmond told The Scientist.

Joe Berry, a global ecologist from the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Stanford and a collaborating researcher at Biosphere 2, told The Scientist, "I am most concerned for the younger folks who have invested critical parts of their careers into this venture—with assurances from Columbia that they would not be let down."

Built in the 1980s, Biosphere 2, named in deference to "Biosphere 1," the Earth, was originally designed as a closed systems environment, a place where researchers could study the interactions between ecosystems on a small scale. The 3-acre facility, owned by billionaire Ed Bass, contains several different ecosystems, including savanna, rainforest, ocean, and desert.

From 1991 to 1993, eight "biospherians" sealed themselves in the glass-enclosed dome and tried to survive on sustainable agriculture and recycling. Problems of low crop yields and a decreased oxygen supply plagued the crew, and the project's scientific validity as well as the credibility of the management were called into question by scientists at the Smithsonian Institute and elsewhere.

In 1996, the Earth Institute at Columbia University created the Biosphere 2 Center, a management group to oversee scientific research at the site. The airtight seal on the structure was broken, and research proceeded on a smaller scale with more individual projects being done.

According to Allen, the management change came when Bass converted from a total systems approach to a reductionist view of scientific research. "The original design and operation of Biosphere 2 was to study total systems," he said. "Columbia did a lot of good reductionist science, and there's a place for that."

"Columbia University has been engaged in addressing climate change and related challenges to the earth's environment for decades," Robert Kasdin, senior executive vice president of Columbia, said in a statement. "As part of this engagement by our faculty and students, over the past 8 years the university directed resources and energy to research and education at Biosphere 2. A number of scientific discoveries have been made, and students from around the country have been exposed to the scientific and policy challenges they will confront throughout their lives."

Spokespersons and others at Columbia declined further comment.