高级英语第一册lesson3shipsinthedesert课文.docx

1、高级英语第一册lesson3shipsinthedesert课文高级英语第一册 lesson3 ships in the desert 课文Ships in the DesertAL GoreI was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishingship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn t agood day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productivefish

2、ing site in all of central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , theprospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have beengentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there wasnothing but hot dry sand as far as I could see in all directions. The otherships of the fl

3、eet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunesthat stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was thefourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of NorthAmericas Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that usedto feed it has been di

4、verted 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 nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fishbrought not from the Aral Sea but

5、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 of theseimages of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in theTrans-Antar

6、ctic 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.Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked andpeeling, he point

7、ed 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, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away fromWashington, D. C., even

8、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 that began with the industrial revolution early in thelast century and has picked up sp

9、eed 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. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole,upwind from the ice runway where the ski pl

10、ane 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 watched one scientist draw theresults of that days measurements, pushing the end of a ste

11、ep 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 the midnight sun at theother end of our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-too

12、t-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 a half feetthick and a nuclear submarine hovered in the water below. After itcrashed th

13、rough 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 ofglobal warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between ice scientistsand the U. S. Navy

14、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 after we met the submarine, we were crashing throughthat ice, surfacing, and then I was

15、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 collide. But here too, CD, levels arerising just as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will

16、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 plays such a crucialrole in the worlds weather system, the consequences of a thinning

17、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 distribution in the Arctic,and a second team reported a still controversialclaim (which a variet

18、y 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 springsnowmelt now comes earlier every year, and deep in the tundra below, thetemperat

19、ure 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 where billowingclouds of smoke regularly blacken the sky above the immense but nowthrea

20、tened 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 now, with more than one Tennessees worth of rain forest beingslashed and burned each y

21、ear. 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 we have never even heard.But one doesnt have to travel around the world to witnesshumank

22、inds 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 signals the loss of ecological balance now in progress. If the skyis clear after sunse

23、t - 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 the earth is first cloaked in the evening darkness;shimmering above us with a translucent

24、 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 released from landfills , from coal mines andrice paddies, from billions of termites that s

25、warm 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 more water vapor into the upperatmosphere, where it condenses at much higher altitudes to

26、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 emotions we feel at the zoo? Perhaps we should feelawe for our own power: just as men t e

27、ar 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, we are once again adding tothe threat of global warming, because methane has been one o

28、f 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 startleus that we have now put these clouds in the evening sky which glisten with aspectra

29、l 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 earth?Even though it is sometimes hard to see their meaning, we have by heads inanow a

30、ll 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 our 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