(单词翻译:单击)
听力文本
The massive ice sheet topping Greenland is losing nearly 300 billion tons a year to melting, according to NASA estimates.
And all that meltwater means rising seas.
But it's also dumping huge amounts of nutrients and minerals into Arctic waters.
"The great thing about glaciers and ice sheets, is that they're these big, very heavy systems, and as they move over rock they grind and crush the rock up."
Jon Hawkings, a glacial biogeochemist at the University of Bristol in the U.K.
"So they expose all these reactive kind of trace components of the rock lattice to the fresh meltwater that's coming in.”
That meltwater funnels rock dust into Greenland's glacial rivers, where Hawkings and his colleagues took their samples.
They found that Greenland's rivers are much richer in phosphorus than previously believed.
And they estimate that Greenland's glacial rivers may flush some 400,000 tons of phosphorus into ocean waters every year—that's on par with the amount of phosphorous dumped into the ocean by the Mississippi or Amazon rivers.
The findings appear in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles.
All that extra phosphorus could be fertilizer for ocean life.
"It's an essential nutrient for phytoplankton, who are the guys on the bottom of the food chain.
So it's really, really important for life.
And life can't exist without it."
And this process—glaciers grinding rocks, then melting and flushing those nutrients to sea—it's not the first time it's happened.
In fact, the authors speculate that during the last extreme ice age—the so-called "snowball Earth," some 700 million years ago—all this phosphorus runoff may have caused a bloom in ocean life.
A bloom that may have ultimately oxygenated the planet...and paved the way for organisms like us.
参考译文
NASA估计，格陵兰岛巨大的冰盖正以每年3000亿吨的速度融化。
而所有这些使得海平面上升。
但同时大量营养物质及矿物也会流入北极海域。
冰川和冰盖的伟大之处在于巨大的体积，庞大的质量，而且可以在移动岩石的时候进行研磨并最终将其粉碎。
英国布里斯托尔大学的冰川地质学家乔恩·霍金斯说道。
“因此岩石中的丰富微量成分将进入融化雪水中。”
而融化的雪水将岩石中的沙尘过滤，最终流入格陵兰的冰川河流，而霍金斯和他的同事们对海水进行了取样。
结果他们发现，格陵兰的河流比以前认为的拥有更丰富的磷含量。
而他们估计格陵兰的冰川河流每年会将大约400,000吨的磷注入海洋—而这和密西西比河或亚马逊河每年的磷注入量相等。
这项研究已在《全球生物化学循环 》杂志上发表。
“所有这些额外的磷将成为海洋生物的肥料。
而对于食物链底层的浮游植物而言，磷是不可或缺的营养元素。
因此磷对生命而言真的至关重要。
没有磷，生命就无法存活。”
而冰川研磨岩石将营养物质融化后流入海洋的这一过程并不罕见。
该研究的作者估计，实际上在过去的极端冰河时代—7亿年前雪球假说中，正是这些磷使得海洋生命茁壮成长。
而生命异彩纷呈的绽放最终使得我们的星球有氧化，并为我们人类奠定了基础。
译文为可可英语翻译，未经授权请勿转载！
重点讲解
1.according to 根据
例句:They will swap posts in a year's time, according to new party rules which rotate the leadership.
根据轮流担任领导的新政党章程，他们在一年后会轮换职位。
2.crush up 粉碎
例句:Huge hammers crush up the rocks.
用大锤把岩石砸成了碎块。
3.dump into 倾倒
例句:Busily transforming this dump into beautiful luxury condos.
忙碌得把这堆垃圾改成一座豪华的公寓。
4.food chain 食物链
例句:When these were no longer available, the killer whales were forced to fish farther down the food chain.
当虎鲸不能再捕食它们的时候，它就被迫捕食处于更下一层的食物链（的生物）。
