美国有线新闻 CNN 2014-04-15

搜索关注在线英语听力室公众号：tingroom，领取免费英语资料大礼包。

 

Here is the deal. Forecasters from Colorado State University are looking at conditions for the 2014 Atlantic Hurricane Season. It officially runs from June 1st through November 30th, though hurricanes can form at any time. This year, meteorologists expect things to be relatively² calm with 9 possible tropical storms and 3 likely hurricanes. On average, there are 12 tropical storms and 7 hurricanes.

 

One reason for a calm forecast is El Nino, it's a natural climate pattern and that means warmer water in parts of the Pacific that can have a calming effect on Atlantic weather. 

 

But forecasts are far from an exact science. In 2012, there were almost twice as many storms than experts expected. Last year, there were 2 hurricanes when 9 were expected. 

 

Satellites, planes, ships and sonobuoys like the one you see in this Youtube clip, drop from above dive into the ocean, listening for anything that could be a signal from a Malasyia Airline passenger plane. It vanished more than a month ago, no trace of the plane has been recovered, signals have been heard beneath the Indian Ocean waves by several listening devices on several different occasions, but to understand why it's so hard to pinpoint³ the plane's possible whereabouts, you have to go deep.

 

Plunging⁴ to nearly 15,000 feet below sea level is a journey into a mysterious abyss, a journey few humans can even comprehend. The Boeing 777 is about 200 feet wide 242 feet long and possibly so deep under the Indian ocean that you'd pass the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, and the tallest building in the world in Dubai on the way down, and still be only a fraction of the way to where the plane wreckage⁵ may be resting. Keep plunging and you've enter a place sunlight can't reach. Pinger locator is being told well below that, 4600 feet below the surface.

 

Marine⁶ biologist Paula Carlson says at these depths, marine life is unlike anything most people have ever seen. 

 

"... And then deeper you go, you find less and less. They have to be very cold tolerant, they have to have, they might not even have eyes, they might be blind because they don't need to there is no life down there."

 

Keep going toward the ocean floor, and at 12,500 feet below sea level is where you find the wreckage of the Titanic⁷, which took some 70 years to discover and where it still rests today. And if it were turned upside down at 14,400 feet is where you hit the iconic peak of Washington State Mount Rainier. Only after all that would you reach the spot where search teams believe the pings from the flight data recorder are coming from 14800 feet into the abyss.

 

If that doesn't capture the magnitude of this search, then imagine what one oceanographer described for us. She says picture yourself standing⁸ on top of one of the highest peaks in the Rocky Moutains looking all the way down and trying to find a suitcase in the dark.

 

The pressure at nearly 15,000 feet is crushing and very few manned submarine can even withstand it.

 

There are only a half dozen of that can go to basically half the ocean depth with a number of countries having that capability⁹. If it gets to the point of... of collapse¹⁰, it basically implodes¹¹. It just crashes.

 

Finding the plane is daunting¹² bringing it back from the deep, even more difficult. At &(* CNN.

 

You might have had Sriracha before, it's a hot sauce. On the Scoville scale, which measures spiciness¹³, it's about half as hot as tabasco. But a califonia city council is turning up the heat on the factory that makes it declaring the factory a public nuisance. This is all because how it smells, people in the community of Irwindale, California, say a Sriracha plant that's close to town, gives off spicy¹⁴ fume¹⁵, so spicy that residents say it's giving them asthma¹⁶, heartburn, teary eyes,and nosebleed. Since it opened, the plant has brought new jobs to Irwindale. The company says it has state of art air filters to prevent pollution. But because of the complaints, the city is giving the plant 90 days to clean up its act or representatives are threating they may change it themselves.

分享到：