万物简史 第360期:进入对流层(1)

17 Into the Troposphere 第十七章 进入对流层 Thank goodness for the atmosphere. It keeps us warm. 谢天谢地，我们有了大气。它使我们有了个温暖的环境。 Without it, Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice with an average te

万物简史 第361期:进入对流层(2)

From ground level to its highest point, the troposphere (or turning sphere) 从地面到最高点，对流层（亦称对流圈） is about ten miles thick at the equator and no more than six or seven miles high in the temperate latitudes where most

万物简史 第362期:进入对流层(3)

The temperature six miles up can be -70 degrees Fahrenheit, and you would need, or at least very much appreciate, supplementary oxygen. 10公里高空的温度会降至零下57摄氏度，你需要补充氧气，至少很希望这么做。 After you

万物简史 第363期:进入对流层(4)

Even so, spaceships have to take care in the outer atmosphere, particularly on return trips to Earth, 即使这样，宇宙飞船在外层大气也不得不小心翼翼，尤其是在重返地球的过程中。 as the space shuttle Columbia demonstra

万物简史 第357期:孤独的行星(22)

Oxygen itself is not combustible; it merely facilitates the combus tion of other things. （氧本身是不可燃的，它只是帮助别的东西燃烧。 This is just as well, for if oxygen were corn bustible, each time you lit a match all the air

万物简史 第373期:进入对流层(14)

However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. From the outset this numeric eccentricity bothered some people, and in 1742 Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, came up w

万物简史 第378期:进入对流层(19)

What happens is that surface waters, as they get to the vicinity of Europe, 情况是这样的：表面海水抵达欧洲附近以后， grow dense and sink to great depths and begin a slow trip back to the southern hemisphere. 密度增加，沉到深

万物简史 第377期:进入对流层(18)

Oceans are the real powerhouse of the planet's surface behavior. 海洋是地球表面活动的真正动力源泉。 Indeed, meteorologists increasingly treat oceans and atmosphere as a single system, which is why we must give them a little of our at

万物简史 第376期:进入对流层(17)

When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. 要是你望一眼湖水，你看到的是一大堆分子，它们在那里平均已达10年之久。 In the ocean the residence

万物简史 第375期:进入对流层(16)

Any water molecule that strays beyond the edge of the cloud is immediately zapped by the dry air beyond, allowing the cloud to keep its fine edge. 要是水分子越出该云边缘，外面干燥的空气马上会把它除掉，从而使积云的边缘

万物简史 第374期:进入对流层(15)

To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard's system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloudstratocumulus,

万物简史 第372期:进入对流层(13)

The standard way to envision this is to imagine yourself at the center of a large carousel and tossing a ball to someone positioned on the edge. By the time the ball gets to the perimeter, the target person has moved on and the ball passes behind him

万物简史 第371期:进入对流层(12)

Though a lawyer by profession, Hadley had a keen interest in the weather (he was, after all, English) and also suggested a link between his cells, the Earth's spin, and the apparent deflections of air that give us our trade winds. However, it was an

万物简史 第370期:进入对流层(11)

What we do know is that because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can't abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air's way of trying to keep

万物简史 第369期:进入对流层(10)

At the equator the convection process is generally stable and the weather predictably fair, but in temperate zones the patterns are far more seasonal, localized, and random, which results in an endless battle between systems of high-pressure air and

万物简史 第368期:进入对流层(9)

Jet streams, usually located about 30,000 to 35,000 feet up, can bowl along at up to 180 miles an hour and vastly influence weather systems over whole continents, yet their existence wasn't suspected until pilots began to fly into them during the Sec

万物简史 第367期:进入对流层(8)

Certainly there is no shortage of energy in the world above our heads. One thunderstorm, it has been calculated, can contain an amount of energy equivalent to four days' use of electricity for the whole United States. In the right conditions, storm c

万物简史 第366期:进入对流层(7)

Air is deceptive stuff. Even at sea level, we tend to think of the air as being ethereal and all but weightless. In fact, it has plenty of bulk, and that bulk often exerts itself. As a marine scientist named Wyville Thomson wrote more than a century

万物简史 第365期:进入对流层(6)

People who habitually live at altitude have often spent thousands of years developing disproportionately large chests and lungs, increasing their density of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost a third, though there are limits to how much thicken

万物简史 第364期:进入对流层(5)

In The Other Side of Everest, the British mountaineer and filmmaker Matt Dickinson records how Howard Somervell, 在《珠穆朗玛峰的另一侧》中，英国登山家兼电影制片人马特迪金森记录下了霍华德萨默维尔的情况。 o