万物简史 第247期:大地在移动(1)

12 The Earth Moves 第十二章 大地在移动 In one of his last professional acts before his death in 1955, Albert Einstein wrote a short but glowing foreword to a book by a geologist named Charles Hapgood entitled Earth's Shifting Crust: A Key to

万物简史 第248期:大地在移动(2)

Taylor came from a wealthy family and had both the means and freedom from academic constraints to pursue unconventional lines of inquiry. He was one of those struck by the similarity in shape between the facing coastlines of Africa and South America,

万物简史 第249期:大地在移动(3)

Wegener developed the theory that the world's continents had once come together in a single landmass he called Pangaea, where flora and fauna had been able to mingle, before the continents had split apart and floated off to their present positions. A

万物简史 第250期:大地在移动(4)

There was also the problem, demonstrated by Rutherford and Soddy early in the century, that Earthly elements hold huge reserves of heatmuch too much to allow for the sort of cooling and shrinking Suess suggested. And anyway, if Suess's theory was cor

万物简史 第252期:大地在移动(6)

To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west by about a mile a year, which is clearly nonsense. (It's more like half an inch.) Above all, he could offer no convincing explanation for how the landmasses moved about. T

万物简史 第253期:大地在移动(7)

Elsewhere, however, the new theory drew steady if cautious support. In 1950, a vote at the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science showed that about half of those present now embraced the idea of continental drift. (H

万物简史 第254期:大地在移动(8)

There was one other major problem with Earth theories that no one had resolved, or even come close to resolving. That was the question of where all the sediments went. Every year Earth's rivers carried massive volumes of eroded material500 million to

万物简史 第255期:大地在移动(9)

It was scored everywhere with canyons, trenches, and crevasses and dotted with volcanic seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist named Arnold Guyot. All this was a puzzle, but Hess had a war to take part in, and put such t

万物简史 第256期:大地在移动(10)

A very little of this had been known for some time. People laying ocean-floor cables in the nineteenth century had realized that there was some kind of mountainous intrusion in the mid-Atlantic from the way the cables ran, but the continuous nature a

万物简史 第257期:大地在移动(11)

That explained where all the sediment went. It was being returned to the bowels of the Earth. It also explained why ocean floors everywhere were so comparatively youthful. None had ever been found to be older than about 175 million years, which was a

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