高级英语第一册lesson3shipsinthedesert课文Word文档下载推荐.docx

1、s Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that usedto feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to growcotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers acrossthe sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked.Meanwhile, in the nea

2、rby town of Muynak the people were still canning fishbrought not from the Aral Sea but shipped by rail through Siberia fromthe Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisishas led me to travel around the world to examine and study many

3、 of theseimages of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in theTrans-Antarctic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a holein the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientistin the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time.Slip

4、ping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked andpeeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from theglacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to theice of two decades ago. Heres where the U. S Congress passed the CleanAir Act,

5、” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away fromWashington, D. C., even a small reduction in one countrys emissions hadchanged the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessibleplace on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth satmosphere is the one

6、that began with the industrial revolution early in thelast century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, andlater oil, and we began to burn lots of it bringing rising levels of carbondioxide （CO2） , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere andslowly warm the earth. Few

7、er than a hundred yards from the South Pole,upwind from the ice runway where the ski plane lands and keeps its enginesrunning to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together,scientists monitor the air several times every day to chart the course ofthat inexorable change. During my visit, I wa

8、tched one scientist draw theresults of that days measurements, pushing the end of a steep line stillhigher on the graph. He told me how easy it is there at the end of theearth to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is stillpicking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under

9、the midnight sun at theother end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slabof ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, mycompanions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to arendezvous point where the ice was thinner only three and

10、a half feetthick and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After itcrashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, Italked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately thethickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit ofgloba

11、l warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientistsand the U. S. Navy to secure the release of previously top secret datafrom submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what ishappening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, andsome eight hours a

12、fter we met the submarine, we were crashing throughthat ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape,windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by littlehummocks, or pressure ridges of ice that are pushed up like tinymountain ranges when separate sheets collid

13、e. But here too, CD, levels arerising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with themindeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much morerapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar airwarms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap

14、 plays such a crucialrole in the worlds weather system, the consequences of a thinning capcould be disastrous.Considering such scenarios is not a purely speculative exercise.Six months after I returned from the North Pole, a team of scientistsreported dramatic changes in the pattern of ice distribut

15、ion in the Arctic,and a second team reported a still controversialclaim （which a variety ofdata now suggest） that, over all, the north polar cap has thinned by 2 percent in just the last decade. Moreover, scientists established severalyears ago that in many land areas north of the Arctic Circle, the

16、 springsnowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, thetemperature e of the earth is steadily rising.As it happens, some of the most disturbing images ofenvironmental destruction can be found exactly halfway between theNorth and South poles precisely at the equator in Brazil

17、where billowingclouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but nowthreatened Amazon rain forest. Acre by acre, the rain forest is beingburned to create fast pasture for fast-food beef; as I learned when Iwent there in early 1989, the fires are set earlier and earlier in the dryseason

18、 now, with more than one Tennessees worth of rain forest beingslashed and burned each year. According to our guide, the biologist TomLovejoy, there are more different species of birds in each square mile ofthe Amazon than exist in all of North America which means we aresilencing thousands of songs w

19、e have never even heard.But one doesnt have to travel around the world to witnesshumankinds assault on the earth. Images that signal the distress of ourglobal environment are now commonly seen almost anywhere. On somenights, in high northern latitudes, the sky itself offers another ghostlyimage that

20、 signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the skyis clear after sunset - and if you are watching from a place where pollutionhasnt blotted out the night sky altogether - you can sometimes see astrange kind of cloud high in the sky. This noctilucent cloud occasionallyappears when th

21、e earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness;shimmering above us with a translucent whiteness, these clouds seem quiteunnatural. And they should: noctilucent clouds have begun to appear moreoften because of a huge buildup of methane gas in the atmosphere. （Alsocalled natural gas, methane is rele

22、ased from landfills , from coal mines andrice paddies, from billions of termites that swarm through the freshly cutforestland, from the burning of biomass and from a variety of other humanactivities. ） Even though noctilucent clouds were sometimes seen in thepast., all this extra methane carries mor

23、e water vapor into the upperatmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to form moreclouds that the suns rays still strike long after sunset has brought thebeginning of night to the surface far beneath them.What should we feel toward these ghosts in the sky? Simplewonder or the mix of em

24、otions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feelawe for our own power: just as men t ear tusks from elephantssuch quantity as to threaten the beast with extinction, we are rippingmatter from its place in the earth in such volume as to upset the balancebetween daylight and darkness. In the process,

25、we are once again adding tothe threat of global warming, because methane has been one of thefastest-growing green-house gases, and is third only to carbon dioxide andwater vapor in total volume, changing the chemistry of the upperatmosphere. But, without even considering that threat, shouldnt it sta

26、rtleus that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with aspectral light? Or have our eyes adjusted so completely to the brightlights of civilization that we cant see these clouds for what they arephysical manifestation of the violent collision between human civilizationand the

27、 earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by heads inanow all witnessed surprising experiences that signal the damage from ourassault on the environment -whether its the new frequency of days whenthe temperature exceeds 100 degrees, the new speed with which the -unburns o

28、ur skin, or the new constancy of public debate over what to do withgrowing mountains of waste. But our response to these signals is puzzling.Why havent we launched a massive effort to save our environment? Tocome at the question another way Why do some images startle us intoimmediate action and focus our attention or ways to respond effecti