万物简史 第258期:大地在移动(12)

but in the 1950s Patrick Blackett of the University of London and S. K. Runcorn of the University of Newcastle studied the ancient magnetic patterns frozen in British rocks and were startled, to say the very least, to find them indicating that at som

万物简史 第265期:大地在移动(19)

Australia, meanwhile, has been tilting and sinking. Over the past 100 million years as it has drifted north toward Asia, its leading edge has sunk by some six hundred feet. It appears that Indonesia is very slowly drowning, and dragging Australia dow

万物简史 第266期:砰!(1)

Part IV Dangerous Planet 第四部 处境危险的行星 The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.British geologist Derek V. Ager 地球的任何一部分历史

万物简史 第267期:砰!(2)

The trauma to Manson's geology had come not from within the Earth, but from at least 100 million miles beyond. Sometime in the very ancient past, when Manson stood on the edge of a shallow sea, a rock about a mile and a half across, weighing ten bill

万物简史 第268期:砰!(3)

At the library in Manson they are delighted to show you a collection of newspaper articles and a box of core samples from a 1991-92 drilling program, 在曼森图书馆，他们会很高兴给你看一批收藏的报纸文章和一箱子取自1991-19

万物简史 第269期:砰!(4)

The story begins in the early 1950s when a bright young geologist named Eugene Shoemaker paid a visit to Meteor Crater in Arizona. 故事始于20世纪50年代之初。当时，有一位名叫尤金苏梅克的年轻有为的地质学家对亚利桑那

万物简史 第270期:砰!(5)

The few craters that remained evident on Earth (most had been eroded away) were generally attributed to other causes or treated as fluky rarities. 一般来说，地球上仅有的几个明显的坑(大多数已经被侵蚀干净)要么被归于别的原

万物简史 第271期:砰!(6)

What Shoemaker and his colleagues found was that there was more risk out therea great deal morethan anyone had ever imagined. 苏梅克和他的同事们发现的是，外层空间存在着比想像的还要多多得多的危险。 Asteroids, as most

万物简史 第272期:砰!(7)

By the early 1900s, it had often become impossible to know whether an asteroid that popped into view was new 到20世纪初，往往分不清哪颗小行星是刚刚出现的， or simply one that had been noted earlier and then lost track of. 哪颗小

万物简史 第273期:砰!(8)

In a sense it hardly matters. 在某种意义上，这项工作并不很重要。 Identifying an asteroid doesn't make it safe. 确认一颗小行星不会使它安全一点。 Even if every asteroid in the solar system had a name and known orbit, 即使

万物简史 第263期:大地在移动(17)

No one can say what causes the oceans' chemistry to change so dramatically from time to time, but the opening and shutting of ocean ridges would be an obvious possible culprit. 谁也说不清什么原因导致了海洋化学成分不时发生戏剧性

万物简史 第264期:大地在移动(18)

The outline of Gondwana, a once-mighty continent connecting Australia, Africa, Antarctica, and South America, was based in large part on the distribution of a genus of ancient tongue fern called Glossopteris, which was found in all the right places.

万物简史 第262期:大地在移动(16)

Earth is alone among the rocky planets in having tectonics, and why this should be is a bit of a mystery. It is not simply a matter of size or densityVenus is nearly a twin of Earth in these respects and yet has no tectonic activity. It is thoughttho

万物简史 第261期:大地在移动(15)

Pick up a pebble from a Massachusetts beach, and its nearest kin will now be in Africa. The Scottish Highlands and much of Scandinavia are substantially American. Some of the Shackleton Range of Antarctica, it is thought, may once have belonged to th

万物简史 第260期:大地在移动(14)

It was equally dismissive of convection and seafloor spreading. And in Basin and Range, published in 1980, John McPhee noted that even then one American geologist in eight still didn't believe in plate tectonics. 它同样不承认对流理论和海床

万物简史 第259期:大地在移动(13)

One geologist later described it as probably the most significant paper in the earth sciences ever to be denied publication. 有一位地质学家后来把它描述成很可能是有史以来被拒绝发表的最有意义的地球科学论文。 At a

万物简史 第274期:砰!(9)

Altogether it is thoughtthough it is really only a guess, based on extrapolating from cratering rates on the Moon, 据认为──虽然只是根据月球上形成凹坑的速度所作的一种推测， that some two thousand asteroids big enough to

万物简史 第275期:砰!(10)

While Gene Shoemaker was trying to get people galvanized about the potential dangers of the inner solar system, 正当尤金苏梅克试图提醒人们注意太阳系内部的潜在危险的时候， another developmentwholly unrelated on the face of

万物简史 第276期:砰!(11)

But the thinness of the clay layer clearly suggested that in Umbria, if nowhere else, something rather more abrupt had happened. 但是，这层薄薄的黏土显然表明，在翁布里亚，如果不是在别处的话，事情发生得非常突然。

万物简史 第277期:砰!(12)

This involved bombarding samples with neutrons in a small nuclear reactor and carefully counting the gamma rays that were emitted; 这项技术包括在一个小型核反应堆里用中子轰击样品，仔细计算释放出来的射线。 it was ext