He had discovered the boundary between the crust and the layer immediately below, the mantle; this zone has been known ever since as the Mohorovicic discontinuity, or Moho for short.
他發(fā)現(xiàn)地殼與下面一層即地幔的界線，此后，這個區(qū)域后來一直被稱之為莫霍洛維契奇不連續(xù)面，簡稱莫霍面。
We were beginning to get a vague idea of the Earth's layered interior—though it really was only vague. Not until 1936 did a Danish scientist named Inge Lehmann, studying seismographs of earthquakes in New Zealand, discover that there were two cores—an inner one that we now believe to be solid and an outer one (the one that Oldham had detected) that is thought to be liquid and the seat of magnetism.
我們開始對地球內(nèi)部的層次有了個模糊的概念──雖然的確僅僅是模糊的。1936年，丹麥科學(xué)家英·萊曼在研究新西蘭地震的地震儀讀數(shù)的過程中，發(fā)現(xiàn)有兩個地核──一個內(nèi)核和一個外核。內(nèi)核我們現(xiàn)在認為是堅硬的；外核被認為是液態(tài)的，是產(chǎn)生磁力的地方。
At just about the time that Lehmann was refining our basic understanding of the Earth's interior by studying the seismic waves of earthquakes, two geologists at Caltech in California were devising a way to make comparisons between one earthquake and the next. They were Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg, though for reasons that have nothing to do with fairness the scale became known almost at once as Richter's alone. (It has nothing to do with Richter either. A modest fellow, he never referred to the scale by his own name, but always called it "the Magnitude Scale.")
就在萊曼通過研究地震波，提高我們對地球內(nèi)部的基本認識的時候，加州理工學(xué)院的兩位地質(zhì)學(xué)家發(fā)明了一種把前一次地震和后一次地震進行比較的方法。他們是查爾斯·里克特和貝諾·古滕堡。由于與公平毫不相干的原因，震級的名稱幾乎馬上只被稱之為里氏震級。（這些原因與里克特本人也毫不相干。里克特是個很謙遜的人，從來不在震級前面加上自己的名字，總是只叫“震級”。）
The Richter scale has always been widely misunderstood by nonscientists, though perhaps a little less so now than in its early days when visitors to Richter's office often asked to see his celebrated scale, thinking it was some kind of machine.
許多非科學(xué)家對里氏震級一直存在誤解，雖然現(xiàn)在的情況也許有所改善。早年，參觀里克特辦公室的人往往要求看一眼他的杰作，以為那是一臺機器。
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