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  劍4Test3雅思閱讀passage2原文+翻譯-火山驚天動地大消息

  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——驚天動地大消息

  1991年6月9日，Pinatubo火山突然爆發，結果，有關過去和現在火山爆發威力的文： 章再度登上了報紙的頭版。

  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火山就是終極“移山倒海”的機器。一次猛烈的噴發可以把一座山的山頭轟掉幾千米，將細灰幾乎灑遍全世界，把巖石碎片拋進平流層，遮蔽整個大洲的天空。

  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，這種典型的噴發——錐形山體，轟隆巨響，蘑菇云升起，熔巖噴涌——只是長篇故事中的一小章。火山作用，這個由火山活動而來的名詞，的確塑造了我們的世界。火山噴發撕裂大陸，舉起山脈，構筑島嶼，最終造就了整個世界地形。五大洋的海底基巖就是火山噴發形成的玄武巖。

  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.

  火山不僅造就了大陸，也許還造就了地球上第一個穩定的大氣層，并且為大洋、河流以及冰川提供了水資源。現在全球有600多座活火山。這些火山每年都要為地球增加兩、三立方公里的巖石。想像一下，過去3,500年中這600多座火山一直在噴發，這些巖石就足夠解釋地殼是如何形成的了。

  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.

  從火山口噴發出來的主要是氣體。其中有90%是來自地心深處的水蒸氣：火山一連噴發了3,500年，這就足夠解釋大洋中的水是從哪里來的了。其余氣體有氮氣、二氧化碳、二氧化硫、甲烷、氨氣以及氫氣。同樣經過了3,500年的積累，這些氣體的量就足以解釋大氣層之“大”了。我們能活著，正是因為火山提供了我們需要的土壤、空氣和水。

  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地質學家認為地球有一個熔化的核心，周圍是半熔化的地幔，外邊是一層脆脆的外皮。想像一個半熟的雞蛋會有些幫助——流淌的蛋黃，堅實但又黏稠的蛋清，還有一層堅硬的蛋殼。在煮的時候，蛋殼只要有一點點開裂，蛋淸就會噗噗地冒出來，在裂縫周圍形成一座小小的山脈——就像夏威夷群島那樣的火山群島。只是地球大得多，里面的地幔也燙得多。

  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.

  盡管在上層壓力下地幔是固態的，但是它們仍然可以像蜜糖一樣“流淌”。這種流動據信是以對流形式進行的，力量足以使地殼這“蛋殼”破裂成板塊，并且使這些板塊互相碰撞摩擦，甚至使它們以一年數厘米的速度互相重疊。這些破碎的地方正是碰撞發生的地方，也是地震發生之處，通常也是火山出現的地方。

  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這些區域正是脆質帶，也就是地震多發區。每次噴發都不盡相同，但是簡而言之，在脆弱的地方，地幔深處的巖石被加熱到1,350攝氏度，并開始膨脹上升。當地幔變化的時候，壓力就會減小，因此地幔就開始膨脹并變成液體，然后迅速上漲。

  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.

  有時候噴發很慢：巖漿——地幔中熔化的巖石——的巨大氣泡慢慢接近地表，慢慢變冷，最后作為花崗巖突起顯露出來。(在斯凱島和大玄武巖山，熔巖堤壩像牙膏一樣擠出來，延伸成為英格蘭北部哈德良長城的一部分。)有時候——比如在北愛爾蘭，威爾士以及南非的干旱臺地卡魯——巖漿上升得很快，然后以大厚塊的形式水平地涌上地面。在印度西部的德千髙原，經過超過50萬年咕嘟咕嘟的火山噴發，積累了超過200萬立方公里的熔巖，其中有些厚達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.

  有時候巖漿移動得十分迅速。在向上噴涌的過程中沒有時間冷卻。沸騰的巖石中所包含的氣體突然膨脹，熔巖因為受熱而閃閃發光，巖漿開始冒泡，接著以巨大的力量爆發。然后，下面稍微涼一點的熔巖開始漫出火山口。這種情形曾經發生在火星上，也曾經發生在月球上，甚至在木星和天王星的衛星上也曾經出現過。通過研究這些證據，火山學家們得以了解過去大噴發的威力。輕石是不是很輕并且充滿孔洞?其噴發的力量是巨大的。巖石是否很重，是否像北愛爾蘭巨人堤一樣，有著巨大的結晶玄武巖形狀?那就是一場緩慢，溫和的噴發。

  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.

  最劇烈的噴發發生在大洋中間深深的海底，新的熔巖將大陸撕開，每年將大西洋加寬五厘米。觀察一下火山、地震和像菲律賓和日本這樣的群島，你就會看到被稱為地殼板塊的大致輪廓——地殼板塊組成了地球的地殼和地幔。這其中最明顯的例子就是太平洋上的“火環”，那里曾經發生過最劇烈的噴發——馬尼拉附近的Pinatubo噴發，洛基山脈中的圣海倫山噴發，還有十年前的墨西哥EI Chichón山噴發，更不用提1883年蘇丹海峽喀拉喀托山震驚世界的噴發。

  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然而火山噴發并不總是能被預測，那是因為地質時間與人類時間不同。在休眠期，火山用熔巖將自己蓋起來，用溢出火山口的熔巖形成堅硬的錐型體，隨后熔巖慢慢冷卻成為又大又哽，穩固的巖頸，巖頸會阻止進一步的噴發，直到壓力大到無法抵擋為止。拿Pinatubo山為例，這個過程花了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，有時候，只有一個小小的征兆，火山就噴發了。1902年5月8日早上7點49分，Martinique的Pelée山爆發了。28，000人的城鎮，只有兩人幸存。在1815年，一次突然噴發炸掉了印度尼西亞的Tambora山1,280米的山頂。那次噴發如此劇烈，以至于噴進平流層的火山灰遮蔽了天空，使得歐洲和美洲直接進人秋季。六月下雪，八月上霜，糧食因此而歉收，上千人忍饑挨餓，火山，尤其是那些安靜的火山，是潛在的世界新聞。

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