48. Earth's Last Frontier: The Sea（海洋，地球最后的待开发疆域）
1. We've all gone a little crazy about the outer space2 business, says Vice1 Admiral C.B. Momsen. The ocean is the place where we should be putting our efforts in order to provide for future generations.''
1、大家都对那些外太空的事情有的狂热，海军上将C、B、Momsen说，为了供养子孙后代，海洋才是大家应该投入努力的地方。
2. Seventy-one percent of the earth's surface is covered by water. An observer, looking at the earth from another planet, would be likely to call it Oceanus. If all the continents and mountains were bulldozed flat, the earth would be covered by water more than 12,000 feet deep.
2、地球表面的百分之七十一被水覆盖。一个观测者从另一个行星看地球将可能称其为海洋之神。假如所有些国内和山脉被推平，那样地球表面将被一层超越12000英尺深的水所覆盖。
3. Sea and air are pided by a viscous2 curtain; beneath the curtain is an element weighing 800 times as much as air, utterly3 dark a few fathoms4 down, and with pressures that would pulp5 a man at 3,000 feet. Yet we know that many animals live in the deeps at pressures of 15,000 pounds per square inch.
3、海洋和空气被一种粘性的帘布分开，帘布之下是一种比空气重800倍的成分，向下几英嚼完全黑暗，在3000英尺深处的重压会把人压成酱。然而，大家了解不少动物生活在每英寸15000磅重压的深处。
4. As a life environment, the sea is a kind of land turned upside down. The sunlit pastures are at the TOP, where the water is saturated6 with tiny drifting vegetables, phyTOPlankton, and equally minute animals, zooplankton. The athletic7 animals come up to graze in this fertile prairie and become links in extensive food chains, formed roughly along the lines3 suggested by Shakespeare:
4、作为一个生命环境，海洋好似一块倒转过来的陆地。阳光普照的牧场在上面，这里的海水中充满着微小的漂浮植物，也就是浮游植物，与同样微小的动物、即浮游动物。运动的动物从下层海水中游上来，到这块肥沃的牧场上觅食，构成了广阔的食物链中的环节。这类大致好似莎士比亚的剧本台词中所说：
5. Master, I marvel8 how the fishes live in the sea.
5、主人，我惊讶鱼如何在大海里存活。
6. Why, as we do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones.
6、为何?好似大家陆地上的所做：大的一直吃小的。
7. The food chains extend to the abyss. The most amazing fact about this inverted9 life pyramid is that only 2% of the nutritive matter ends up in swimming fish. The rest falls to the invertebrates10: pulsing jelly fish, darting11 shrimp12, fixed13 colonies5 of coral polyps, and crawlers and diggers of the floor. There are about 30,000 known species of marine14 life, and marine biologists discover more than 100 new ones each year.
7、食物链一直延伸到深渊。最让人惊奇的事是这个反向倒转的生命金字塔里仅仅2％的营养物质在游动的鱼嘴里终结。其余部分落入无脊椎动物嘴中：脉动式水母、刺虾、珊瑚虫群、海底的爬行动物和潜在泥中的动物。目前已经了解的海洋生命大约有30000种，而且海洋生物学家们每年都会发现超越100种新的海洋物种。
8. One main branch of sea science, physical oceanography, holds enormous unanswered questions. The nature of the bottom, the circulation of the deep currents, and the chemistry of the water are poorly understood.
8、海洋科学的一个主要分枝，物理海洋学，有为数海量的未解之题。海底的自然生态、深海水流的循环，与海水化学现在都知之甚少。
9. The Atlantic hydrographic chart is being revised continuously, and nuclear submarines are now charting the Arctic basin under the ice. Yet vast areas of the Pacific are unmapped and the Indian Ocean has hardly been touched. We know that several depressions in the floor are deeper than Mt. Everest is high, but we cannot be sure that we have found the deepest one.
9、大西洋水文图在持续不断地被修订，核潜艇目前正在冰卞进行北极海盆的测绘。然而，太平洋的大片海域还没海底地图，印度洋甚至尚未被着手。大家已经了解有几个海床坑处的深度高于珠穆朗玛峰的高度，但大家不可以确定大家已经找到了海底最深的地方。
10. Consider the abyssal valley called the Marianas Trench15, lying west of Guam. In 1951, the British Challenger expedition sounded6 33,640 feet at one place in the trench. In 1957 the Soviet16 ship Vitiaz sounded 300 feet deeper at another place nearby, and later the Russian vessel17 found a spot 225 feet deeper than that.
10、留神一下坐落于关岛西面的名叫马利亚纳海沟的深海谷地。1951年，英国挑战者探险队测到海沟的一个地方有33640英尺深。1957年，苏联船Vitiaz号测到在附近的另一个地方比上处更深300英尺。其后，俄国船发现另一个地址比刚刚那个还深225英尺。
11. The French navy has built an abyssal bathyscaphe to take three men to the floor of the Marianas Trench. It seems certain that no human observers will ever get closer to the core of the earth than these men. The world's deepest land shaft18 accessible to men is the Champion Reef gold mine in India, which is only 9,811 feet deep.
11、法国海军已经建造了一个深海潜水器，用来装载三个人去到马利亚纳海沟的基底。看来非常确定的是，不会再有任何其他观测者能比这三个人更接近地球的核心。世界上最深的，人可以到达的陆基深井是在印度的Champion Reef金矿，深度仅仅9811英尺。
12. The depthmen will measure cosplaymic ray penetration19 of the sea, radioactivity, and the age of the water in the abyss. They may also make still and motion pictures of the trench, take water and sedimental temperatures, and perhaps sight no one knows what living creatures in that perpetual night. Serious scientists like Sir Alister Hardy20 of Oxford21 do not rule out the possibility that there are sea monsters to be discovered. A few years ago pers22, working in a wreck23 under the Red Sea, several times sighted a wrasse 20 feet long. This is a common vegetarian24 species, never before found more than three feet long.
12、深入海底的人将在深海测量宇宙射线对海水的穿透力、放射性活动，与海水的年龄。他们还要对海沟摄像摄影，测量水和沉积物的温度，或许还能观测到那永恒黑夜下中不为人知的生物。像牛津大学的Alister Hardy先生样严谨的科学家们没排除在那里海洋怪物被发现的可能性。几年前，在红海底一只沉船里工作的潜水员几次看到一条20英尺长的濑鱼。这是一种容易见到的草食的鱼类，以前从来没发现过有超越3英尺长的。
13. The recent discovery of an eel25 larva many times the size of the common one may furnish a basis for stories of sea serpents. The mature eel has not been discovered, but it could possibly come in sea serpent dimensions.
13、近期一条幼龄鳗鱼其尺寸是普通鳗鱼的不少倍的发现，可能提供了深海大毒蛇故事的依据。成熟的此类鳗鱼还没被发现过，但估计其尺寸非常可能达到深海大毒蛇的水平。
14. One aspect of oceanography that has fallen into neglect is that of identifying fish: taxonomy. It is considered dull work to catalogue fish. One of the great taxonomists is J.L.B. Smith of South Africa, the discoverer of the fabulous26 coelacanth. This brute27 was brought up by fishermen off East Africa and aroused the curiosity of the curator of a provincial28 museum, who sent a sketch29 of it to Smith. He instantly identified it as a coelacanth, a species believed extinct for 60 million years. Somewhere in his files, Smith recalled seeing the animal as an empty fossil split from a rock.
14、海洋学的个已经被忽略的范围是对鱼进行分类辨别：分类学。它被觉得是一种将鱼进行分门别类的乏味的工作。南非的J、L、B、Smith是世界上最好的分类学家之一，他是让人很难置信的腔棘鱼的发现者。这种鱼被渔民在东部非洲捕上来，随即引起省立博物馆馆长的好奇心，他寄给了Smith先生一份腔棘鱼的素描图。Smith先生立刻辨别出它是腔棘鱼，一种被觉得6000万年前已灭绝的物种。在他的文档某处，Smith先生回忆道这个动物看起来像一个从岩石上剥离下来的化石。
15. Almost everything we know or think we knowabout the sea is open? at both ends. The questions themselves may be wrong, and many of the answers are under challenge. Take the theory of photosynthesis30, which holds that the growth of all vegetation, and consequently of animals, depends on the action of the sun on carbon dioxide and water.
15、关于海洋，几乎大家了解的所有，或者大家觉得已经了解的所有问题，其实在两个方面都尚需考虑。这类问题本身可能就是不对的，同时，不少问题的答案在面对置疑。拿光合用途理论来讲，这个理论觉得所有植物成长、进而乃至动物，都依靠于太阳对二氧化碳和水有哪些用途。
16. A French zoologist31, Professor Brouardel, has preliminary evidence that some marine animals of the abyss thrive in the blackness without any discernible action of photosynthesis. It will take him years of the most painstaking32 instrument building, campaigns at sea, and every conceivable cross-check to establish the doubt. only if these negative results are valid33 will he be able to formulate34 the question: how do they live, if not by photosynthesis? Then the study can begin.
16、一个法国动物学家Brouardel教授，获得了初步的证据，证明某些深海海洋动物在漆黑的、没任何可辨识的光合用途行为下茁壮成长。他将要花费多年时间，从事最艰苦的设施制造、海中活动、反复核对的工作，以确立这个置疑。只有当这类否定的结论被确认时他才能开始讲解这个问题：假如不是依靠光合用途，深海海洋动物如何存活?之后，研究就会开始。
17. Unable to see the underwater world until recently, oceanographers have relied on blind groping into the 'depths. They lowered nets, dredges, bathythermographs, still cameras, water bottles, coring pipes, and current meters. Today continuous recording35 instruments from a ship underway are able to bring up data from a long strip of the sea.
17、直至今仍然不可以看见这个水下世界，海洋学家需要依靠盲目地暗中探索进入深海。他们沉降下去网、挖掘机、深海温度测量器、静态照相机、水瓶、与取心钻管和测流计。今天，在长途海上航行中，船载连续记录设施可以获得数据。
18. Water itself is vital to the future of the race. Not too far in the future, science will crack the water atom for nuclear energy, and, before then, power will be coming from harnessing tides and thermal36 exchanges under water.
18、水本身就是人类将来的至关要紧的原因。在不太远的以后，科学将为了核能源而分裂转变水中的原子，在那之前，电力以后自水下潮汐绳索和水下热交换。
19. The sea is the realm of inner space. It is our last frontier.
19、海洋是内部空间范围。它是大家最后的待开发疆域。
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