2024年4月2日发(作者：)

阳光英语沙漠之舟原文

I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of

processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn't a good day .We were

anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all of central

Asia ,but as I looked out over the bow. the prospects of a good catch looked

bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against

the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand-as far as I could see in all

directions. The other ships of the fleet were also at rest in the sand, scattered in

the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon. Ten years ago, the Aral was

the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North

America's Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to

feed it has been diverted in an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton in

the user. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from

where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby

town of Muynak the people were still canning fish-brought not from the Aral Sea

but shipped by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand

miles away.

My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to

travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of

destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarctic

Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in

the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in 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 and peeling, he pointed to the annual layers of ice

in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his

finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. "Here's where the U. S

Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” he said. At the bottom of the world, two

continents away from Washington, D. C., even a small reduction in one country's

emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least

accessible place on earth. But the most significant change thus far in the earth’s

atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial revolution early in the last

century and has picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil,

and we began to burn lots of it bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2),

with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth.

Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway

where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal

parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air sever all times every

day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one

scientist draw the results of that day's measurements, pushing the end of a steep

line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is - there at the end of the

earth - to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking

up speed.

Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of

our planet, in a small tent pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the

Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by

snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was

thinner - only three and a half feet thick - and a nuclear submarine hovered in the