2015考研英语阅读欢迎来到人类纪

　　Welcome to the Anthropocene

　　欢迎来到人类纪

　　Humans have changed the way the world works. Nowthey have to change the way they think about it, too

　　人类改变了世界运行方式，现在，人类不得不改变他们思考世界的方式

　　THE Earth is a big thing; if you divided it up evenly among its 7 billion inhabitants, they wouldget almost 1 trillion tonnes each. To think that the workings of so vast an entity could belastingly changed by a species that has been scampering across its surface for less than 1% of1% of its history seems, on the face of it, absurd. But it is not. Humans have become a forceof nature reshaping the planet on a geological scalebut at a far-faster-than-geological speed.

　　地球是个庞然大物。如果你把它均分给其间的70亿居民，每个人能分到近1万亿吨。表面看来，一个渺小的物种，生命不及地球的万分之一，在其表面跑跑跳跳竟能永久性地改变如此巨大实体的运行机制，想一想都是荒谬之事。不过确有其事。人类已经成为重塑地球地质年表的自然力量，其速度比地质构造自然演化的过程快得多。

　　A single engineering project, the Syncrude mine in the Athabasca tar sands, involves moving 30billion tonnes of earthtwice the amount of sediment that flows down all the rivers in the worldin a year. That sediment flow itself, meanwhile, is shrinking; almost 50,000 large dams haveover the past half- century cut the flow by nearly a fifth. That is one reason why the Earthsdeltas, home to hundreds of millions of people, are eroding away faster than they can bereplenished.

　　阿萨巴斯卡油砂的辛克鲁德矿是一个单一工程项目。该项目涉及移动300亿吨泥土这一数字是地球上所有河流一年中流动的泥沙总量的两倍。与此同时，泥沙流本身也在逐渐消减。在过去半个世纪中，近50000个大型大坝截断近1/5的泥沙流。这也是为什么数以百万计人类的家园三角洲地区泥沙补给速度不及侵蚀速度而呈现蚀退之势。

　　Geologists care about sediments, hammering away atthem to uncover what they have to say about thepastespecially the huge spans of time as the Earthpasses from one geological period to another. In thesame spirit they look at the distribution of fossils,at the traces of glaciers and sea-level rises, and atother tokens of the forces that have shaped theplanet. Now a number of these scientists arearguing that future geologists observing thismoment in the Earths progress will conclude thatsomething very odd was going on.

　　地质学家关心泥沙，潜心研究以揭示过去尤其是当地球从一个地质时期到另外一个地质时期这种巨大跨度时，地球究竟发生了什么。基于相似的理念，他们把目光投向化石的分布、冰川的痕迹、海平面的上升以及其他一些使地球成型的外力标志。现在，相当数量的地质学家推测，未来地质学家在观察今天的地质演化时，也会发现一些奇怪的变化。

　　The carbon cycle is part of this change. So too is thenitrogen cycle, which converts pure nitrogen from the air into useful chemicals, and whichmankind has helped speed up by over 150%. They and a host of other previously naturalprocesses have been interrupted, refashioned and, most of all, accelerated .Scientists are increasingly using a new name for this new period. Rather than placing us still inthe Holocene, a peculiarly stable era that began only around 10,000 years ago, the geologistssay we are already living in the Anthropocene: the age of man.

　　碳循环是这种变化的一部分。氮循环也是如此，它将空气中纯粹的氮转化为有用的化学制品人类在使氮循环加速超过150%。这两种循环和其他一些此前的自然进程被打断、被改变，而且最重要的是，被加速。科学家们越来越多地为这种新时期使用一种新的名称。地质学家们称，我们已经生活在人类纪人的时代，而不是仍将人类放在约1000年前开始的特别稳定的年代全新世。