剑4Test3阅读译文Passage2-火山惊天动地大消息

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　　Passage2

　　参考译文

　　Volcanoes-earth-shattering news

　　When Mount Pinatubo suddenly erupted on 9 June 1991, the power of volcanoes past and present again hit the headlines.

　　火山——惊天动地大消息

　　1991年6月9日，Pinatubo火山突然爆发，结果，有关过去和现在火山爆发威力的文： 章再度登上了报纸的头版。

　　A Volcanoes are the ultimate earth-moving machinery. A violent eruption can blow the top few kilometres off a mountain, scatter fine ash practically all over the globe and hurl rock fragments into the stratosphere to darken the skies a continent away.

　　A火山就是“移山倒海”的机器。一次猛烈的喷发可以把一座山的山头轰掉几千米，将细灰几乎洒遍全世界，把岩石碎片抛进平流层，遮蔽整个大洲的天空。

　　But the classic eruption — cone-shaped mountain, big bang, mushroom cloud and surges of molten lava — is only a tiny part of a global story. Volcanism, the name given to volcanic processes, really has shaped the world. Eruptions have rifted continents, raised mountain chains, constructed islands and shaped the topography of the earth. The entire ocean floor has a basement of volcanic basalt.

　　然而，这种典型的喷发——锥形山体，轰隆巨响，蘑菇云升起，熔岩喷涌——只是长篇故事中的一小章。火山作用，这个由火山活动而来的名词，的确塑造了我们的世界。火山喷发撕裂大陆，举起山脉，构筑岛屿，最终造就了整个世界地形。五大洋的海底基岩就是火山喷发形成的玄武岩。

　　Volcanoes have not only made the continents, they are also thought to have made the world’s first stable atmosphere and provided all the water for the oceans, rivers and ice-caps. There are now about 600 active volcanoes. Every year they add two or three cubic kilometres of rock to the continents. Imagine a similar number of volcanoes smoking away for the last 3,500 million years. That is enough rock to explain the continental crust.

　　火山不仅造就了大陆，也许还造就了地球上个稳定的大气层，并且为大洋、河流以及冰川提供了水资源。现在全球有600多座活火山。这些火山每年都要为地球增加两、三立方公里的岩石。想像一下，过去3,500年中这600多座火山一直在喷发，这些岩石就足够解释地壳是如何形成的了。

　　What comes out of volcanic craters is mostly gas. More than 90% of this gas is water vapour from the deep earth: enough to explain, over 3,500 million years, the water in the oceans. The rest of the gas is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. The quantity of these gases, again multiplied over 3,500 million years, is enough to explain the mass of the world’s atmosphere. We are alive because volcanoes provided the soil, air and water we need.

　　从火山口喷发出来的主要是气体。其中有90%是来自地心深处的水蒸气：火山一连喷发了3,500年，这就足够解释大洋中的水是从哪里来的了。其余气体有氮气、二氧化碳、二氧化硫、甲烷、氨气以及氢气。同样经过了3,500年的积累，这些气体的量就足以解释大气层之“大”了。我们能活着，正是因为火山提供了我们需要的土壤、空气和水。

　　B Geologists consider the earth as having a molten core, surrounded by a semi-molten mantle and a brittle, outer skin. It helps to think of a soft-boiled egg with a runny yolk, a firm but squishy white and a hard shell. If the shell is even slightly cracked during boiling, the white material bubbles out and sets like a tiny mountain chain over the crack — like an archipelago of volcanic islands such as the Hawaiian Islands. But the earth is so much bigger and the mantle below is so much hotter.

　　B地质学家认为地球有一个熔化的核心，周围是半熔化的地幔，外边是一层脆脆的外皮。想像一个半熟的鸡蛋会有些帮助——流淌的蛋黄，坚实但又黏稠的蛋清，还有一层坚硬的蛋壳。在煮的时候，蛋壳只要有一点点开裂，蛋淸就会噗噗地冒出来，在裂缝周围形成一座小小的山脉——就像夏威夷群岛那样的火山群岛。只是地球大得多，里面的地幔也烫得多。

　　Even though the mantle rocks are kept solid by overlying pressure, they can still slowly ‘flow’ like thick treacle. The flow, thought to be in the form of convection currents, is powerful enough to fracture the ‘eggshell’ of the crust into plates, and keep them bumping and grinding against each other, or even overlapping, at the rate of a few centimetres a year. These fracture zones, where the collisions occur, are where earthquakes happen. And, very often, volcanoes.

　　尽管在上层压力下地幔是固态的，但是它们仍然可以像蜜糖一样“流淌”。这种流动据信是以对流形式进行的，力量足以使地壳这“蛋壳”破裂成板块，并且使这些板块互相碰撞摩擦，甚至使它们以一年数厘米的速度互相重叠。这些破碎的地方正是碰撞发生的地方，也是地震发生之处，通常也是火山出现的地方。

　　C These zones are lines of weakness, or hot spots. Every eruption is different, but put at its simplest, where there are weaknesses, rocks deep in the mantle, heated to 1,350℃, will start to expand and rise. As they do so, the pressure drops, and they expand and become liquid and rise more swiftly.

　　C这些区域正是脆质带，也就是地震多发区。每次喷发都不尽相同，但是简而言之，在脆弱的地方，地幔深处的岩石被加热到1,350摄氏度，并开始膨胀上升。当地幔变化的时候，压力就会减小，因此地幔就开始膨胀并变成液体，然后迅速上涨。

　　Sometimes it is slow: vast bubbles of magma — molten rock from the mantle — inch towards the surface, cooling slowly, to show through as granite extrusions (as on Skye, or the Great Whin Sill, the lava dyke squeezed out like toothpaste that carries part of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England). Sometimes — as in Northern Ireland, Wales and the Karoo in South Africa — the magma rose faster, and then flowed out horizontally on to the surface in vast thick sheets. In the Deccan plateau in western India, there are more than two million cubic kilometres of lava, some of it 2,400 metres thick, formed over 500,000 years of slurping eruption.

　　有时候喷发很慢：岩浆——地幔中熔化的岩石——的巨大气泡慢慢接近地表，慢慢变冷，最后作为花岗岩突起显露出来。(在斯凯岛和大玄武岩山，熔岩堤坝像牙膏一样挤出来，延伸成为英格兰北部哈德良长城的一部分。)有时候——比如在北爱尔兰，威尔士以及南非的干旱台地卡鲁——岩浆上升得很快，然后以大厚块的形式水平地涌上地面。在印度西部的德千髙原，经过超过50万年咕嘟咕嘟的火山喷发，积累了超过200万立方公里的熔岩，其中有些厚达2，400米。

　　Sometimes the magma moves very swiftly indeed. It does not have time to cool as it surges upwards. The gases trapped inside the boiling rock expand suddenly, the lava glows with heat, it begins to froth, and it explodes with tremendous force. Then the slightly cooler lava following it begins to flow over the lip of the crater. It happens on Mars, it happened on the moon, it even happens on some of the moons of Jupiter and Uranus. By studying the evidence, vulcanologists can read the force of the great blasts of the past. Is the pumice light and full of holes? The explosion was tremendous. Are the rocks heavy, with huge crystalline basalt shapes, like the Giant’s Causeway in Northern Ireland? It was a slow, gentle eruption.

　　有时候岩浆移动得十分迅速。在向上喷涌的过程中没有时间冷却。沸腾的岩石中所包含的气体突然膨胀，熔岩因为受热而闪闪发光，岩浆开始冒泡，接着以巨大的力量爆发。然后，下面稍微凉一点的熔岩开始漫出火山口。这种情形曾经发生在火星上，也曾经发生在月球上，甚至在木星和天王星的卫星上也曾经出现过。通过研究这些证据，火山学家们得以了解过去大喷发的威力。轻石是不是很轻并且充满孔洞?其喷发的力量是巨大的。岩石是否很重，是否像北爱尔兰巨人堤一样，有着巨大的结晶玄武岩形状?那就是一场缓慢，温和的喷发。

　　The biggest eruptions are deep on the mid-ocean floor, where new lava is forcing the continents apart and widening the Atlantic by perhaps five centimetres a year. Look at maps of volcanoes, earthquakes and island chains like the Philippines and Japan, and you can see the rough outlines of what are called tectonic plates — the plates which make up the earth’s crust and mantle. The most dramatic of these is the Pacific ‘ring of fire’ where there have been the most violent explosions — Mount Pinatubo near Manila, Mount St Helen’s in the Rockies and El Chichón in Mexico about a decade ago, not to mention world-shaking blasts like Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits in 1883.

　　最剧烈的喷发发生在大洋中间深深的海底，新的熔岩将大陆撕开，每年将大西洋加宽五厘米。观察一下火山、地震和像菲律宾和日本这样的群岛，你就会看到被称为地壳板块的大致轮廓——地壳板块组成了地球的地壳和地幔。这其中最明显的例子就是太平洋上的“火环”，那里曾经发生过最剧烈的喷发——马尼拉附近的Pinatubo喷发，洛基山脉中的圣海伦山喷发，还有十年前的墨西哥EI Chichón山喷发，更不用提1883年苏丹海峡喀拉喀托山震惊世界的喷发。

　　D But volcanoes are not very predictable. That is because geological time is not like human time. During quiet periods, volcanoes cap themselves with their own lava by forming a powerful cone from the molten rocks slopping over the rim of the crater; later the lava cools slowly into a huge, hard, stable plug which blocks any further eruption until the pressure below becomes irresistible. In the case of Mount Pinatubo, this took 600 years.

　　D然而火山喷发并不总是能被预测，那是因为地质时间与人类时间不同。在休眠期，火山用熔岩将自己盖起来，用溢出火山口的熔岩形成坚硬的锥型体，随后熔岩慢慢冷却成为又大又哽，稳固的岩颈，岩颈会阻止进一步的喷发，直到压力大到无法抵挡为止。拿Pinatubo山为例，这个过程花了600年。

　　Then, sometimes, with only a small warning, the mountain blows its top. It did this at Mont Pelée in Martinique at 7.49 a.m. on 8 May, 1902. Of a town of 28,000, only two people survived. In 1815, a sudden blast removed the top 1,280 metres of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. The eruption was so fierce that dust thrown into the stratosphere darkened the skies, cancelling the following summer in Europe and North America. Thousands starved as the harvests failed, after snow in June and frosts in August. Volcanoes are potentially world news, especially the quiet ones.

　　然而，有时候，只有一个小小的征兆，火山就喷发了。1902年5月8日早上7点49分，Martinique的Pelée山爆发了。28，000人的城镇，只有两人幸存。在1815年，一次突然喷发炸掉了印度尼西亚的Tambora山1,280米的山顶。那次喷发如此剧烈，以至于喷进平流层的火山灰遮蔽了天空，使得欧洲和美洲直接进人秋季。六月下雪，八月上霜，粮食因此而歉收，上千人忍饥挨饿，火山，尤其是那些安静的火山，是潜在的世界新闻。

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