《高级英语第一册Unit 3 文章结构+课文讲解+课文翻译+课后练习+答案》由会员分享，可在线阅读，更多相关《高级英语第一册Unit 3 文章结构+课文讲解+课文翻译+课后练习+答案（46页珍藏版）》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Unit 3 Ships in the Desert Ships in the Desert Ships in the Desert AL Gore- I was standing in the sun on the hot steel deck of a fishing ship capable of processing a fifty-ton catch on a good day. But it wasn t a good day. We were anchored in what used to be the most productive fishing site in all o
2、f central Asia, but as I looked out over the bow , the prospects of a good catch looked bleak. Where there should have been gentle blue-green waves lapping against the side of the ship, there was nothing but hot dry sand as far as I could see in all directions. The other ships of the fleet were also
3、 at rest in the sand, scattered in the dunes that stretched all the way to the horizon . Ten year s ago the Aral was the fourth-largest inland sea in the world, comparable to the largest of North Americas Great Lakes. Now it is disappearing because the water that used to feed it has been diverted in
4、 an ill-considered irrigation scheme to grow cotton In the user t. The new shoreline was almost forty kilometers across the sand from where the fishing fleet was now permanently docked. Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Muynak the people were still canning fish brought not from the Aral Sea but shipp
5、ed by rail through Siberia from the Pacific Ocean, more than a thousand miles away.My search for the underlying causes of the environmental crisis has led me to travel around the world to examine and study many of these images of destruction. At the very bottom of the earth, high in the Trans-Antarc
6、tic Mountains, with the sun glaring at midnight through a hole in the sky, I stood in the unbelievable coldness and talked with a scientist in the late tall of 1988 about the tunnel he was digging through time. Slipping his parka back to reveal a badly burned face that was cracked and peeling, he po
7、inted to the annual layers of ice in a core sample dug from the glacier on which we were standing. He moved his finger back in time to the ice of two decades ago. Heres where the U. S Congress passed the Clean Air Act, ” he said. At the bottom of the world, two continents away from Washington, D. C.
8、, even a small reduction in one countrys emissions had changed the amount of pollution found in the remotest end least accessible place on earth.But the most significant change thus far in the earth s atmosphere is the one that began with the industrial r evolution early in the last century and has
9、picked up speed ever since. Industry meant coal, and later oil, and we began to burn lots of it bringing rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) , with its ability to trap more heat in the atmosphere and slowly warm the earth. Fewer than a hundred yards from the South Pole, upwind from the ice runway
10、where the ski plane lands and keeps its engines running to prevent the metal parts from freeze-locking together, scientists monitor the air sever al times ever y day to chart the course of that inexorable change. During my visit, I watched one scientist draw the results of that days measurements, pu
11、shing the end of a steep line still higher on the graph. He told me how easy it is there at the end of the earth to see that this enormous change in the global atmosphere is still picking up speed.Two and a half years later I slept under the midnight sun at the other end of our planet, in a small te
12、nt pitched on a twelve-toot-thick slab of ice floating in the frigid Arctic Ocean. After a hearty breakfast, my companions and I traveled by snowmobiles a few miles farther north to a rendezvous point where the ice was thinner only three and a half feet thick and a nuclear submarine hovered in the w
13、ater below. After it crashed through the ice, took on its new passengers, and resubmerged, I talked with scientists who were trying to measure more accurately the thickness of the polar ice cap, which many believe is thinning as a re-suit of global warming. I had just negotiated an agreement between
14、 ice scientists and the U. S. Navy to secure the re-lease of previously top secret data from submarine sonar tracks, data that could help them learn what is happening to the north polar cap. Now, I wanted to see the pole it-self, and some eight hours after we met the submarine, we were crashing thro
15、ugh that ice, surfacing, and then I was standing in an eerily beautiful snowcape, windswept and sparkling white, with the horizon defined by little hummocks, or pressure ridges of ice that are pushed up like tiny mountain ranges when separate sheets collide. But here too, CD, levels are rising just
16、as rapidly, and ultimately temperature will rise with them indeed, global warming is expected to push temperatures up much more rapidly in the polar regions than in the rest of the world. As the polar air warms, the ice her e will thin; and since the polar cap plays such a crucial role in the worlds weather system, the consequences of a thinning cap could be disastr
