(单词翻译:单击)
Across the century and a half since the Challenger expedition, our understanding of life in the depths has offered many surprises.
自“挑战者”号探险以来的一个半世纪里，我们对深海生命的了解给我们带来了许多惊喜。
One of the most important of these involves the existence of thriving communities of living things clustered around hydrothermal vents in the ocean floor.
其中最重要的一点是，海底热液喷口周围存在着繁荣的生物群落。
These vents form where cracks in the Earth's crust allow seawater to come into contact with liquid magma.
这些喷口形成于地壳的裂缝，使海水进入喷口与液态岩浆接触。
At the surface, water exposed to magma would simply boil away, but deep below the surface, the pressure prevents this.
在地表，暴露在岩浆中的水会简单地蒸发掉，但在地表以下深处，压力阻止了这一情形的发生。
Instead, the water is expelled back into the ocean in a superheated geyser.
取而代之的是，水通过一个过热的间歇泉被排放回海洋。
These jets can exceed 400C, and bear a stream of minerals upwards from the Earth's mantle.
这些喷流水流的温度可以超过400摄氏度，并携带着一股来自地幔的矿物流。
As the water cools, these minerals solidify, forming structures that can be dozens of metres high and can grow as much as 30cm a day.
随着水的冷却，这些矿物质凝固，形成了几十米高的结构，每天可以变高30厘米。
The first hydrothermal vent was found in 1977 by scientists surveying the seabed 2,500 metres below the ocean on the Galápagos Rift, between Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands, who detected a temperature spike near the ocean floor.
1977年，科学家在查看厄瓜多尔和加拉帕戈斯群岛之间的加拉帕戈斯裂谷海2500米处的海床发现了第一个热液喷口，他们在海底附近发现了一个温度峰值。
When the scientists reviewed the photos their submersible had taken, they were amazed to find a thriving community of living creatures.
当科学家们回看他们的潜水器拍摄的照片时，他们惊讶地发现了一个繁荣的生物群落。
In an article published soon afterwards, the scientist Robert Ballard marvelled that the photograph taken just seconds before the temperature anomaly showed only barren, fresh-looking lava terrain.
在随后不久发表的一篇文章中，科学家罗伯特·巴拉德感到惊讶的是，在温度异常发生前几秒钟拍摄的照片只显示了荒芜、看起来清新的熔岩地形。
But for “13 frames (the length of the anomaly), the lava flow was covered with hundreds of white clams and brown mussel shells.
但在“13帧”(温度异常的时长)，熔岩流被数百只白色蛤蜊和棕色贻贝壳覆盖。
This dense accumulation, never seen before in the deep sea, quickly appeared through a cloud of misty blue water and then disappeared from view.
这种密集的堆积，以前从未在深海中见过，迅速出现在云雾般的蓝色海水中，然后从视野中消失了。
For the remaining 1,500 pictures, the bottom was once again barren of life.”
在剩下的1500张照片中，海底又一次一片荒芜。”
Since that first discovery, more than 600 fields of vents have been identified, all teeming with living organisms.
自第一次发现以来，已经确定了600多个喷口，所有喷口都充满了生物体。
Specially adapted colonies of mussels and other shellfish cling to their seething columns alongside fields of feathery worms and starfish; crabs and shrimp dart here and there, feeding in the cloudy water.
特别适应的贻贝群和其他贝类的群落，紧贴着喷口那火热的柱体，旁边是长满羽毛的蠕虫和海星；蟹和虾在浑浊的水中来回游动觅食。
Such richness of life should be impossible in the darkness of the ocean's depths – without sunlight there is no photosynthesis.
如此丰富的生命在黑暗的海洋深处是不可能存在的——没有阳光就没有光合作用。
But the creatures that thrive around the vents do not draw upon the sun's energy.
但在喷口附近繁荣成长的生物并不依赖太阳的能量。
Instead, they rely on chemosynthetic microbes capable of transforming the chemicals produced by the vents into energy.
相反，它们依靠化学合成微生物，将喷口产生的化学物质转化为能量。
The discovery of animals around hydrothermal vents has led to a dramatic broadening of our understanding of the sorts of environments in which life can survive.
热液喷口附近动物的发现大大拓宽了我们对生命生存环境的理解。
This has significant implications for the search for extraterrestrial life – if life thrives in such environments on Earth, it is plausible it might flourish in similar conditions in the oceans of ice moons such as Enceladus, which orbits Saturn.
这对寻找地外生命有着重要的意义——如果生命在地球上这样的环境中茁壮成长，那么在类似土卫二这样的冰卫星的海洋中，生命也可能在类似的条件下茁壮成长，土卫二围绕土星运行。
It has also shifted assumptions about where life on Earth began: perhaps it was not in a shallow pool, but somewhere in the depths of the primordial sea.
它也改变了关于地球生命起源的假设：也许它不是在一个浅水池里，而是在原始海洋深处的某个地方。
In other words, the deep ocean might not be a place of death and forgetting, but rather the birthplace of life on our planet.
换句话说，深海可能不是死亡和遗忘的地方，而是我们星球上生命的发源地。
