一本新书认为火山能帮助碳捕获和环境恢复 | 书评

《经济学人·商论》2023-09-10

Long feared, volcanoes help the planet

MOUNT EREBUS—named after one of the primordial beings in Greek mythology, son of Chaos, personification of darkness—is the southernmost active volcano in the world. More people have been to space than have travelled to Antarctica and set foot on Mount Erebus (pictured). That is for good reason. When humans first climbed it in the early 1900s, the journey involved violent winds, occasional frostbite and bowls of “hoosh” (a potent, greasy combination of boiled, dehydrated beef and fat, which would not go bad).
埃里伯斯火山（Mount Erebus）是世界上位置最靠南的活火山，它的名字取自希腊神话中的一位创世神，也就是混沌之神卡俄斯（Chaos）的儿子黑暗之神。去过太空的人都比去过南极洲并踏足埃里伯斯火山（见上图）的人多。这并不奇怪。人们在1900年代初首次攀登了这座火山，途中多次遇到暴风，有时会生冻疮，靠一碗碗“杂锅菜”（把不易变质的干制牛肉和脂肪煮沸做出的油乎乎的饱腹浓汤）果腹。

Clive Oppenheimer, a professor of volcanology at Cambridge University, has spent 13 seasons—cumulatively an entire year of his life—living near the summit of Mount Erebus. In “Mountains of Fire” he regales readers with gripping stories of his travels, as well as those of adventurers past. He does not just describe what the volcanoes look like, but how they feel and what they mean to the people who encounter them.
剑桥大学的火山学教授克莱夫·奥本海默（Clive Oppenheimer）13次在埃里伯斯火山顶峰附近居住考察，加起来有一整年的时间。在《火之山》（Mountains of Fire）一书中，他为读者奉上他自己及之前的探险者那些扣人心弦的故事。他不只描述了火山的样貌，还讲述了它们给人的感受，以及对那些遇见它们的人意味着什么。

A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planet. Through that opening, molten rock and hot gases escape. This can be a sudden and thunderous puff of ash and steam, or it can be a protracted ooze of lava, razing everything in its path. Perhaps because of volcanoes’ danger, their longevity and importance are often overlooked. But they live hundreds of thousands of years, and the gases they release come from the inside of the Earth. They are probably the very gases that created Earth’s atmosphere billions of years ago. Volcanoes “made the world fit for human purpose”, Dr Oppenheimer writes.
一座火山就是地壳上的一个破口。通过这个破口，熔岩和高热气体泄漏出来。有时候是突然而剧烈地喷射火山灰和蒸汽，有时候是不断地涌出熔岩，把所经之处破坏殆尽。可能是由于火山的危险性，它们的长期存在和重要性往往被忽视。但这些火山已经存在了千百万年，它们释放的气体来自地球内部。可能正是这些气体在几十亿年前形成了地球的大气。火山“把地球改造得适合人类生存”，奥本海默写道。... ...

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