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A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

dailymail.co.uk

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Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#41

Post by hellbreakslose »

mark-r wrote: post #35
hellbreakslose wrote: post #18

Hmm can we open the bottle and test if the water is indeed from 1972? I mean how can we actually test that this guy isn't just making things up, and wasn't opening the bottle to water the ecosystem?

Water recycles itself naturally. I'd be more curious to know how the oxygen converts back to carbon dioxide.

well I agree but I just can't believe anything like that nowadays... If you want people to believe that the bottle is sealed since 1972 then prove it as well. Not just a photo of a giant bottle with some plants in it.

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#42

Post by [deleted] »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #28
ahi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bacteria in the soil. One of the reasons Biosphere 2 fell apart.

I can't see how decaying plant matter would provide enough CO2 to keep the larger greenery healthy. Perhaps the original soil had an exceptional amount, but it would take time for it to break down; plants can empty a container such as that of CO2 in a day or so.

[deleted]

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#43

Post by droopyEyelids »

darkxanthos wrote: post #36
CapitalistCartr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Daily Fail version claims so, but that doesn't seem sufficient. Nonetheless, its clearly working. It'd be interesting to insert a probe through the cork and run a real-time analysis of the air composition.

I don't think we can say it's clearly working... This seems like an extraordinary claim and it's hard to know if there's any truth fudging.

Another puzzling factor is the clarity of the glass. When I've seen bottle gardens, they all develop a thick scum from minerals in condensation, algae, and bacterial plaques.

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#44

Post by mikeash »

wmil wrote: post #39
murbard2 wrote: post #14

A clear balloon containing an ecosystem would heat up due to the greenhouse effect. If it's sufficiently large and allowed to slightly expand it could float freely in the air. Imagine closed gardens flying freely around the world.

I don't think you could get them to be consistently warm on Earth. But the atmosphere on Venus is so thick you could have a bunch of these floating above the clouds.

Maybe you could replace some of the nitrogen with helium to achieve positive buoyancy without a temperature difference.

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#45

Post by mxfh »

maaarghk wrote: post #9
Luc wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'The Internet Movie Database for Africa' is the original? For that article it's probably the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2267504/The-s... He started it in 1960 with 'about a quarter of a pint of water', then added water in 1972.

it is indeed originally from the daily fail. that's their watermark bottom left.

The Daily Mail, and others just picked this up too. It was first covered in a Q&A style gardening radio show touring the UK.

You can hear David asking at 35:20 in the BBC Radio 4 program Gardeners Question Time first broadcasted Friday 18 January 2013.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pw5sd

The original copy text is under all these 10 orginal photographs taken by Phil Yeomans/BNPS published 21 Jan 2013: http://bnps.photoshelter.com/gallery/52-year-old-sealed-gard...

There is also a close up of the seal: http://bnps.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/52-year-old-seale...

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#46

Post by digitalsushi »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #24

I can't figure out what would be providing more CO2. The container is near full of greenery; where does it get air exchange? Maybe the cork leaks just enough is all I can figure.

Plants suck in CO2 when they are storing energy, but when they spend their energy they make CO2 just like us. Plants have a respiration process just like animals. They just tend to remove more CO2 than they put out (until they get burned/turn into coal, oil, etc)

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#47

Post by windsurfer »

mathattack wrote: post #33
harty65 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a related article: "But the eco-system also uses cellular respiration to break down decaying material shed by the plant. In this part of the process, bacteria inside the soil of the bottle garden absorbs the plant's waste oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide which the growing plant can reuse."

Was this a planned hack, or does this naturally occur? My first thought was also, "Where does the CO2 come from?" I suspect this is a very fine balance - if you're off by just a little, one or the other would die. There's not much room for error in a jar.

Most bacteria and plants can survive in a huge range of CO2 and O2 concentrations. Humans are the ones that cannot.

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#48

Post by ramchip »

mark-r wrote: post #35
hellbreakslose wrote: post #18

Hmm can we open the bottle and test if the water is indeed from 1972? I mean how can we actually test that this guy isn't just making things up, and wasn't opening the bottle to water the ecosystem?

Water recycles itself naturally. I'd be more curious to know how the oxygen converts back to carbon dioxide.

Respiration. Microorganisms use oxygen, and so does the plant when it's not under sunlight.

Re: A sealed bottle garden thriving after 40 years without fresh air or water

#49

Post by mikeash »

hellbreakslose wrote: post #18

Hmm can we open the bottle and test if the water is indeed from 1972? I mean how can we actually test that this guy isn't just making things up, and wasn't opening the bottle to water the ecosystem?

I wonder if carbon dating would work. Seems like it ought to, since C14 is produced in the upper atmosphere, so if's been sealed then it wouldn't get any new C14. The small amount of decay over 42 years might be trouble to measure.

A potentially crazier idea: measure the trace amounts of uranium, plutonium, and other long-lived fallout products. Atmospheric nuclear testing continued on a semi-regular basis until 1980, and so the makeup and concentration of the fallout would be different if it had been unsealed after 1972.

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