The hour hand on a clock moves about ten thousand times faster than the flowing rocks of the mantle. 钟面上时针的移动速度,比地幔岩石的流动速度,要快大约1万倍。 The movements occur not just laterally as the Earth's plates

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So all that can be said is that at some slightly indeterminate point as we head toward the center of Earth we leave the asthenosphere and plunge into pure mantle. 因此,我们只能说,在前往地球中心的过程中,我们会在某个不大确

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The outer core is in many ways even less well understood, though everyone is in agreement that it is fluid and that it is the seat of magnetism. 外核在许多方面被了解得更少,虽然大家都认为它是液态的,是产生磁力的地方。

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We may be going through a reversal now. 我们现在也许正经历一次逆转。 The Earth's magnetic field has diminished by perhaps as much as 6 percent in the last century alone. 仅仅在过去的一个世纪里,地球的磁场就减弱了大约

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At that time, the lower forty-eight United States had not seen a volcanic eruption for over sixty-five years. 当时,美国本土的48个州在过去的65年里没有见过火山爆发。 Therefore the government volcanologists called in to monitor

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Almost the only person who believed that something really bad might happen was Jack Hyde, a geology professor at a community college in Tacoma. 几乎只有一个人认为真的快出大问题了,他就是塔科马一所社区学院的地质学教授

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The luckiest person on that day was a graduate student named Harry Glicken. 那一天最走运的要算是一位名叫哈里格利肯的研究生。 He had been manning an observation post 5.7 miles from the mountain, 他是离火山9公里处一个观

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In an extraordinarily unself-critical book called Surviving Galeras, Williams said he could only shake my head in wonder when he learned afterward 但威廉斯毫不自责,在一本名叫《加莱拉斯火山幸存记》的书里说,当他后来听

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Ninety minutes after the blast, ash began to rain down on Yakima, Washington, 爆发90分钟以后,灰烬开始雨滴般地洒落在华盛顿州的亚基马。 a community of fifty thousand people about eighty miles away. 那是个有5万人口的社

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And what causes these massive intraplate rupturings? 这种跨板块大地震是怎么发生的? Something deep within the Earth. 原因在地球深处。 More than that we don't know. 更多的情况我们就不知道了。 By the 1960s scientists

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Would there be any warning? 会有什么警报吗? Probably not. The last significant explosion in the park was at a place called Pork Chop Geyser in 1989. 很可能没有。公园里上一次大喷发发生在1989年,在一个名叫猪排间歇泉

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15 Dangerous Beauty 第十五章 美丽而危险 In the 1960s, while studying the volcanic history of Yellowstone National Park, 20世纪60年代,美国地质勘测局的鲍勃克里斯琴森在研究黄石国家公园火山史的时候, Bob Chri

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These are volcanoes so explosive that they burst open in a single mighty rupture, leaving behind a vast subsided pit, the caldera (from a Latin word for cauldron). 这种火山的威力如此之大,它们一下子破土而出,留下一个沉降式大

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Imagine a pile of TNT about the size of Rhode Island and reaching eight miles into the sky, to about the height of the highest cirrus clouds, 想像一下,有一堆TNT,面积相当于英国的一个郡,伸向13公里高的天空,达到了最高

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Such plumes are not all that rare. 这样的热柱并不少见。 There are about thirty active ones on the Earth at the moment, and they are responsible for many of the world's best known islands and island chains, 眼下,地球上大约有30处活热

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The ash fall from the last Yellowstone eruption covered all or parts of nineteen western states (plus parts of Canada and Mexico), 上一次黄石火山爆发所喷出的火山灰,铺满了西部19个州的全部地区或部分地区(加上加拿大

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All this was hypothetically interesting until 1973, when an odd occurrence made it suddenly momentous: 这一切都很有意思,但都是假设的。直到1973年,一件怪事发生了,突然之间那个假设变得很有意义: water in Yell

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It may not feel like it, but you're standing on the largest active volcano in the world, 我觉得事情不是这样的,但你是站在世界上最大的活火山上面。 Paul Doss, Yellowstone National Park geologist, told me soon after climbing

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And in between there's everything you could possibly imagine. 介于二者之间的东西应有尽有,只要你想得出来。 I've never been any place where geology is more evidentor prettier. 我从来没有见过哪个地方,地质情况是如此

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Probably you would have swarms of earthquakes and some surface uplift and 很可能是一系列地震,有的地面会隆起, possibly some changes in the patterns of behavior of the geysers and steam vents, but nobody really knows. 间歇泉和喷气

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