評論
打印
Part IV Dangerous Planet
第四部 處境危險的行星
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
地球的任何一部分歷史，猶如一個士兵的生活，由長期的無聊和短期的恐怖組成。——英國地質學家德雷克·V·埃基爾
13 Bang!
第十三章 砰！
People knew for a long time that there was something odd about the earth beneath Manson, Iowa. In 1912, a man drilling a well for the town water supply reported bringing up a lot of strangely deformed rock—"crystalline clast breccia with a melt matrix" and "overturned ejecta flap," as it was later described in an official report. The water was odd too. It was almost as soft as rainwater. Naturally occurring soft water had never been found in Iowa before.
人們很久以來就知道，艾奧瓦州曼森下面的泥土有點兒怪。1912年，有個為該鎮尋找水源而打井的人報告說，他掘出來許多奇形怪狀的巖石──后來在一份官方報告中是這樣描述的：“熔化的脈石里混雜著晶狀的角礫巖屑”，“噴出物的結蓋翻了個身”。那些水也很怪，它幾乎是雨水般的軟水。天然的軟水以前在艾奧瓦州從來沒有發現過。
Though Manson's strange rocks and silken waters were matters of curiosity, forty-one years would pass before a team from the University of Iowa got around to making a trip to the community, then as now a town of about two thousand people in the northwest part of the state. In 1953, after sinking a series of experimental bores, university geologists agreed that the site was indeed anomalous and attributed the deformed rocks to some ancient, unspecified volcanic action. This was in keeping with the wisdom of the day, but it was also about as wrong as a geological conclusion can get.
雖然曼森的巖石很古怪，水很柔軟，但直到41年以后艾奧瓦大學才派了一個小組來到那個社區。當時和現在一樣，曼森只是該州西北部一個大約兩萬人口的小鎮。1953年，打了一系列實驗性的鉆孔以后，該大學的地質學家一致認為，這地方確實有點反常，但把變了形的巖石歸因于古代的一次火山活動。這與當時的認識是一致的，但作為一個地質結論，那就大錯特錯了。
