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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 down with it. Nothing in the theories of tectonics can explain any of this.
與此同時，澳大利亞卻在漸漸傾斜、下沉。在過去的1000萬年里，它一方面朝北向亞洲漂移，另一方面它的主要邊緣下沉了將近200米。看來，印度尼西亞在慢慢地沒入水中，而且拖著澳大利亞一起下去。構造理論根本無法解釋這些現象。
Alfred Wegener never lived to see his ideas vindicated. On an expedition to Greenland in 1930, he set out alone, on his fiftieth birthday, to check out a supply drop. He never returned. He was found a few days later, frozen to death on the ice. He was buried on the spot and lies there yet, but about a yard closer to North America than on the day he died.
阿爾弗雷德·魏格納沒有活到看到自己的思想證明是正確的。1930年，他在50歲生日那天獨自一人出發去格陵蘭島探險，檢查空投的補給品。他再也沒有回來。幾天以后，有人發現他凍死在冰面上。他被埋在那里，至今還在那里長眠，只是比他死的那天離北美洲近了大約1米。
Einstein also failed to live long enough to see that he had backed the wrong horse. In fact, he died at Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955 before Charles Hapgood's rubbishing of continental drift theories was even published.
愛因斯坦也沒有活著看到自己支持了錯誤的一方。他1955年死于新澤西州的普林斯頓，實際上是在查爾斯·哈普古德發表“胡說八道”的大陸漂移理論之前。
The other principal player in the emergence of tectonics theory, Harry Hess, was also at Princeton at the time, and would spend the rest of his career there. One of his students was a bright young fellow named Walter Alvarez, who would eventually change the world of science in a quite different way.
提出構造理論的另一個主要人物哈里·赫斯當時也在普林斯頓，將在那里度過他的余生。他的一位學生是個聰明的年輕人，名叫沃爾特·阿爾瓦雷斯，他最終將以完全不同的方式改變科學界。
As for geology itself, its cataclysms had only just begun, and it was young Alvarez who helped to start the process.
至于地質學本身，大變革還剛剛開始，年輕的阿爾瓦雷斯為啟動這個過程發揮了作用。
