万物简史 第255期:大地在移动(9)

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　　It was scored everywhere with canyons¹, trenches², and crevasses³ and dotted with volcanic⁴ seamounts that he called guyots after an earlier Princeton geologist⁵ named Arnold Guyot. All this was a puzzle, but Hess had a war to take part in, and put such thoughts to the back of his mind.

　　那里到处都是悬崖、沟壑和裂缝，还有星罗棋布的海底火山，即平顶海山。他称其为盖约特，以纪念早年普林斯顿大学的地质学家阿诺德·盖约特。这一切都是个谜，但赫斯的任务是打仗，他便把这些想法搁置脑后了。

　　After the war, Hess returned to Princeton and the preoccupations of teaching, but the mysteries of the seafloor continued to occupy a space in his thoughts. Meanwhile, throughout the 1950s oceanographers were undertaking⁶ more and more sophisticated surveys of the ocean floors. In so doing, they found an even bigger surprise: the mightiest⁷ and most extensive mountain range on Earth was—mostly—underwater.

　　战争结束以后，赫斯回到普林斯顿，主要从事教学工作，但海底之谜仍在他的脑海里占有一席之地。与此同时，在整个20世纪50年代，海洋学家对海底的考察日渐深入。在此过程中，他们发现了一件更加出人意料的事：地球上最雄伟、最大的山脉是在──主要部分是在──水下。

　　海底结构

　　It traced a continuous path along the world's seabeds, rather like the stitching on a baseball. If you began at Iceland, you could follow it down the center of the Atlantic Ocean, around the bottom of Africa, and across the Indian and Southern Oceans, below Australia; there it angled across the Pacific as if making for Baja California before shooting up the west coast of the United States to Alaska. Occasionally its higher peaks poked⁸ above the water as an island or archipelago—the Azores and Canaries in the Atlantic, Hawaii in the Pacific, for instance—but mostly it was buried under thousands of fathoms⁹ of salty sea, unknown and unsuspected. When all its branches were added together, the network extended to 46,600 miles.

　　它沿着世界的海床不断延伸，犹如网球上的花纹。要是从冰岛开始向南进发，你顺着这山脉可以抵达大西洋的中心，然后绕过非洲底部，越过印度洋和南太平洋，进入澳大利亚下方的太平洋；接着，它从斜里穿越太平洋，仿佛要去加利福尼亚半岛，实际上突然隆起，成为美国本土到阿拉斯加的西海岸。偶尔，它的山峰戳出水面，形成海岛或群岛──比如，大西洋上的亚速尔群岛和加那利群岛、太平洋上的夏威夷群岛，但大部分淹没在几公里深的海水下面，无人知晓，无人想到。如果把所有的支脉加在一起，该山脉总长达75000公里。

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