48. Earth's Last Frontier: The Sea.
48、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 Vice Admiral C.B. Momsen. "The ocean is the place where we should be putting our efforts in order to provide for future generations.''
1、“我们都对那些外太空的事情有些狂热，”海军上将C、B、Momsen说，“为了供养子孙后代，海洋才是我们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。如果所有的大陆和山脉被推平，那么地球表面将被一层超过12000英尺深的水所覆盖。
3. Sea and air are divided by a viscous curtain; beneath the curtain is an element weighing 800 times as much as air, utterly dark a few fathoms down, and with pressures that would pulp 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英尺深处的压力会把人压成酱。然而，我们知道很多动物生活在每英寸15000磅压力的深处。
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 saturated with tiny drifting vegetables, phytoplankton, and equally minute animals, zooplankton. The athletic 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，海洋如同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，以及同样微小的动物、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。这些大致如同莎士比亚的剧本台词中所说：
5. "Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea."
5、“主人，我惊讶鱼怎么在大海里生存。”
6. "Why, as we do a-land: the great ones eat up the little ones."
6、“为什么?如同我们陆地上的所做：大的总是吃小的。”
7. The food chains extend to the abyss. The most amazing fact about this inverted life pyramid is that only 2% of the nutritive matter ends up in swimming fish. The rest falls to the invertebrates: pulsing jelly fish, darting shrimp, fixed colonies5 of coral polyps, and crawlers and diggers of the floor. There are about 30,000 known species of marine life, and marine biologists discover more than 100 new ones each year.
7、食物链一直延伸到深渊。最令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。现在已经知道的海洋生命大约有30000种，而且海洋生物学家们每年都会发现超过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，有为数众多的未解之题。(我们对)海底的自然生态、深海水流的循环，以及海水化学目前都知之甚少。
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，核潜艇现在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有海底地图，印度洋甚至尚未被着手(测绘)。我们已经知道有几个海床坑处的深度高于珠穆朗玛峰的高度，但是我们不能确定我们已经找到了海底最深的地方。
10. Consider the abyssal valley called the Marianas Trench, lying west of Guam. In 1951, the British Challenger expedition sounded6 33,640 feet at one place in the trench. In 1957 the Soviet ship Vitiaz sounded 300 feet deeper at another place nearby, and later the Russian vessel found a spot 225 feet deeper than that.
10、留心一下位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点比刚才那个还深225英尺。