恐龍滅絕的日子 - 一分一秒_風聞

【來源龍騰網】

正文原創翻譯：

One of the greatest illusions in life is continuity.66 million years ago, the continuity of the dinosaurs had been going on for around 165 million years already - and it didn’t seem this would change any time soon. The world was warm, and pleasant, and most of the land was covered with lush forests and an incredible diversity of trees, flowers, ferns and trillions of critters.

生命中最大的假象之一就是延續性。6600萬年前，恐龍的延續已經持續了約1.65億年——而且這種情況似乎不會很快改變。這個世界温暖宜人，大部分的土地被茂密的森林覆蓋，還有令人難以置信的多樣性的樹木、花，蕨類植物和數以萬億的生物。

Dinosaurswere ubiquitous and had diversified into hundreds of species of all shapes and sizes. Titanosaurs, large gentle giants shared the world with famous beasts like Tyrannosaurus rex or Edmontosaurus. Pectinodon hunted in the undergrowth while Edmontosaurus wandered coastlines and swamps. 

恐龍無處不在，並且已多樣進化為數百種不同形狀和大小的物種。泰坦龍是一種温和的大型巨龍，與著名的猛獸像雷克斯暴龍或埃德蒙頓龍一起生活在這個世界。當埃德蒙頓龍在海岸線和沼澤遊蕩時，櫛齒龍在灌木叢中獵食。

原創翻譯：龍騰網 http://www.ltaaa.cn 轉載請註明出處

An ancient paradise, a world of plenty, full of life.66 million years ago, maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, life was the same as it had been the day before or a thousand years before or pretty much a million years before. Things were good for our feathered dinosaur buddies. Until a tiny, tiny detail in the sky changed.If there were dinosaurs watching the stars, one night they may have noticed the appearance of a new star. A tiny dot, that for many weeks slowly became bigger and brighter. 

一個古老的天堂，一個富饒的世界，這裏充滿了生命。6600萬年前，也許在一個星期二的下午，生活和前一天，或者一千年前，或者差不多一百萬年前一樣。對長有羽毛的恐龍來説情況一切安好。直到天空中一個非常非常小的細節發生了變化，如果有恐龍一直在觀察星星，某一天的晚上它們可能會注意到一顆新的星星出現。起初是一個小點，幾個星期後慢慢地變大變亮。

Until one fateful day, it looked like another, small moon in the night sky. And then it faded from sight as it dipped into earth’s shadow. For a few more hours the illusion of continuity was upheld . Until it was not anymore. In the morning the obxt suddenly appears again. Now almost as large as the sun in the sky and growing every moment, heading for the coast near the Yucatan Peninsula. It takes the asteroid only two seconds to pass through the thin layer between space and the ground to make contact. 

直到一個命中註定的日子，這顆星星在夜空中看起來像另一個小月亮，然後消失在地球的陰影中。這種延續性的假象維持了幾個小時，直到它不再存在。第二天早上，那個物體突然又出現了。現在它幾乎和天空中的太陽一樣大，且每時每刻都在增長，朝着尤卡坦半島附近的海岸前進。這顆小行星只花費兩秒就穿過了太空和地面之間的薄層，然後與地面接觸。

As it enters the atmosphere at almost 60 times the speed of sound…Let us stop time.Here we see the unnamed asteroid about to commit extinction. Larger than Mount Everest, it reaches from the ocean high into the atmosphere, higher than passenger planes would fly millions of years later.At this moment the world was one way. In a fraction of a second it would be fundamentally different. Let us make the transition.As the asteroid hits the shallow ocean and the bedrock below，the energy of billions of nuclear weapons is released all at once as the asteroid vaporizes. 

它以幾乎是音速60倍的速度進入大氣層……讓我們暫停一下，這裏我們將看到一顆不知名的小行星毀滅地球。它比珠穆朗瑪峯還要大，從海洋深處到大氣層，比幾百萬年後飛行的客機還要高。此時此刻，世界只有一條出路。一瞬間，它就會完全不同。讓我們來過渡一下，當小行星撞擊淺海和底部的基岩時，數十億核武器的能量在小行星蒸發的同時瞬間被釋放出來。

A flash of light illuminates the sky as an eerie bright white sphere grows over the Gulf of Mexico . Bedrock melts into seething hot plasma at tens of thousands of degrees celsius. The thermal radiation from the explosion travels at the speed of light and immediately burns everything within a radius of about 1500 kilometers. 

一道閃光照亮了天空，同時一個神秘的明亮的白色球體在墨西哥灣上空越來越大。基岩在數萬攝氏度的高温下融化成熾熱的熱等離子體。爆炸產生的熱輻射以光速傳播，並瞬間燒燬半徑約1500公里範圍內的一切。

while the energy from the impact pushes so hard against earth’s crust that it loses all strength and flows away from the impact site like a liquid, creating a hole 25 kilometers deep and 100 kilometers wide. The ocean is pushed back for hundreds of kilometers, like when a kid jumps into a puddle.

撞擊產生的能量強烈地衝擊着地殼，以致失去了所有的力量，能量像液體一樣從撞擊點流出，並形成了一個25千米深，100千米寬的洞。海洋被向後推了數百公里，就像一個孩子跳進水坑一樣。

As the crust bounces back, melted and flowing crust forms a temporary mountain stretching 10 kilometers into the sky.. An incredible amount of material is blasted into the higher atmosphere or even out into space, as much as 60 times the original mass of the asteroid.The violence of the strike is felt everywhere on earth within minutes. 

隨着地殼的反彈，融化和流動的地殼形成了一座延伸至天空10公里的臨時大山。大量的物質被噴射到更高的大氣層，甚至進入太空，其質量是小行星原始質量的60倍。幾分鐘內，地球上到處都能感受到猛烈地撞擊。

A magnitude 11 earthquake,maybe the most powerful quake any living thing has ever witnessed in billions of years. It is so insanely strong that in India it might have shaken gigantic lava fields and causes volcanic eruptions that would last for 30,000 years and cover half of the indian subcontinent with lava. Even on the side of earth opposite the impact, the ground still moved by several meters. 

一場11級的大地震，也許是數十億年來地球生物見證的最強烈的一次地震。它是如此的強大，以至於在印度可能引起了巨大的熔岩地帶震動，並導致持續3萬年的火山噴發，火山噴發的岩漿覆蓋了印度次大陸的一半。即使被撞擊點在地球的另一側，這邊的地面仍然移動了幾米。

Nobody would sleep through this day.The gigantic explosion crashes against the atmosphere with unprecedented violence and causes a shockwave that reaches speeds of more than 1,000 kilometers per hour near the site of impact, similar to the hyper hurricanes on gas giants like Neptune. 

沒有誰會在這一天睡着。巨大的爆炸以前所未有的力量衝擊大氣層，在撞擊點附近產生的衝擊波，其速度超過每小時1000公里，類似於海王星等氣態巨行星上的超級颶風。

原創翻譯：龍騰網 http://www.ltaaa.cn 轉載請註明出處

In middle America, basically any soil, vegetation or animal is just shredded into pieces and catapulted thousands of km away.Now the formally displaced oceans return. As the temporary mountain at the site of impact collapses, a ring of tsunamis as high as one kilometer, enough to cover all skyscrapers humans would ever build, heads in all directions. 

在美國中部，基本上任何土壤、植物或動物都會被碎成為碎片，並被彈射到數千公里之外。現在被正式移走的海洋又回來了。當撞擊點的臨時山崩塌時，形成高達一公里的海嘯環，向四面八方湧去，足以覆蓋人類建造的所有摩天大樓。

原創翻譯：龍騰網 http://www.ltaaa.cn 轉載請註明出處

As they crash into the coasts of the continents surrounding the impact, they will drown thousands of kilometers of coastline. 15 hours later some of the waves that get refracted around South America will still tower as much as 100 meters into the sky.But we still have not talked about the worst thing yet.A lot of the debris yeeted into space will orbit earth for thousands of years, some hit the moon or even Mars. But most of it comes right back. 

當它們撞上撞擊點周圍大陸的海岸時，會淹沒數千公里的海岸線。15個小時後，一些在南美洲被折射的波浪仍將高達100米，但我們還沒有談到最糟糕的事情，有很多碎片被炸飛，進入太空將繞地球飛行數千年，有些撞上了月球甚至火星，但大部分都會返回地球。

When things fall through the atmosphere at such speeds they get very hot, like hundreds of degrees hot. And this happens to millions of tons of material everywhere. This rapidly heats up the atmosphere to insane temperatures. We don’t know exactly how hot it got or how long this heat shock lasted but there are two ideas here.Either the air was heated to hundreds of degrees, for a few minutes. Or to thousands of degrees, for around one minute. 

當物質以這樣的速度穿過大氣層墜落時，它們會變得非常熱，有幾百度的高温。這種情況發生在世界各地數百萬噸的物質上，這使大氣温度迅速升高，達到了瘋狂的高温。我們不知道到底有多熱，也不知道熱震持續了多久，但在這裏有兩種觀點，要麼空氣被加熱到幾百度，持續了幾分鐘，要麼就是達到幾千度，持續一分鐘左右。

In any case, the air becomes as hot as the inside of an industrial oven. How bad the global effects of this were is contested ，but if enough heat reached the surface,a lot of plants and animals would have died very quickly if they couldn’t bury themselves or escape into caves. 

不管怎樣，空氣都會變得和工業烤箱內部一樣熱。這對全球的影響是多麼嚴重還存在爭議，但如果足夠的熱量到達地表，許多植物和動物不能掩埋自己或逃入洞穴，它們很快會死亡。

The heat together with raining debris also may have ignited material on forest floors and sparked wildfires as the earth rotated under the searing hot plume. In a few hours massive wildfires were probably burning around the globe. Some of them may have lasted for months and turned earth into a horrifying hot hell.

當地球在灼熱的高温騰起之物下旋轉時，熱量伴隨着雨點般的碎片可能也點燃了森林地面上的物質並引發野火。幾個小時內，大規模的野火可能正在全球燃燒。其中一些可能已經持續了幾個月，並把地球變成了一個可怕的熾熱地獄。

As the day of the impact draws to an end, many of the dinosaurs are already dead, but the worst is still to come.The gigantic plume of vaporized material reaches the upper atmosphere and spreads around the whole globe. Together with the soot from the burning planet and the aerosols generated at impact, the planet sinks into a deep darkness, with only the remaining raging fires illuminating the scenery. 

當撞擊的日子接近尾聲時，很多恐龍已經死亡，但最糟糕的情況還在後面。大量騰起的汽化物質到達上層大氣並擴散到全球各地，加上行星燃燒產生的煙塵和撞擊產生的氣溶膠，地球陷入深深的黑暗中，只有殘留的熊熊大火照亮了天空。

Whatever plants survive the firstorms will now be starved for sunlight as global photosynthesis is temporarily shut down. Within days temperatures crash as much as 25° celsius.The oceans were especially hit hard. The lack of sunlight killed over 90% of plankton which form the basis of the food web of marine life. 

隨着全球光合作用暫時停止，無論哪種植物以第一種形態下存活下來，現在都將缺乏陽光。幾天之內，氣温驟降至25攝氏度。海洋受到的衝擊尤其嚴重，陽光的缺乏殺死了超過90%的浮游生物，而浮游生物是構成海洋生命食物網的基礎。

Ultimately this would kill off the large marine reptiles and ammonites that used to dominate the seas.The biosphere the survivors now find themselves in is like an alien landscape. 

最終，這將殺死曾經主宰海洋的大型海洋爬行動物和菊石。倖存者發現它們自己現在所處的生物圈就像是一個外星景觀。

Ash, debris and the burned remains of the formerly lush and blooming life cover the ground, the sky is dark and it is cold and fresh food is scarce, while fungi thrive. For months and years the planet will be a hostile and deadly place. The sudden global winter will last for decades. At least 75% of all species on earth will just vanish from existence.And so, as the day ends, the world is suddenly different. The continuity that went on for millions of years is no more. 

灰燼、碎片和曾經鬱鬱葱葱的生命燃燒後的殘骸覆蓋了地面，天空陰暗寒冷，新鮮食物匱乏，而真菌卻茁壯成長。在未來的幾個月甚至幾年內，這個星球都將是一個充滿敵意和致命的地方。突如其來的全球寒冬將持續數十年，地球上至少75%的物種將從存在中消失。所以，隨着這天的結束，世界突然變得不同了，持續了數百萬年的延續性已經不復存在。

The Era of the dinosaurs is over. Just like that.Eventually, from the ashes of the old world, survivors emerged. Birds that are the direct descendents of the dinosaurs and mammals that would eventually become the dominant animals on the planet. Without the Asteroid, who knows what life on earth would look like today. 

恐龍時代結束了，就像這樣。最終從舊世界的灰燼中，倖存者出現了。鳥類是恐龍和哺乳動物的直系後代，最終成為地球上的主要動物。如果沒有小行星，誰知道地球上的生命在今天會是什麼樣子。

原創翻譯：龍騰網 http://www.ltaaa.cn 轉載請註明出處

Without the sudden disruption of dinosaur continuity, that completely changed the planet and all life on it, we might have never had the opportunity to become what we are today.It is not clear how long the Human Era will last. So far modern humans have been around for 0.1% of the time the dinosaurs were. And in this short amount of time we’ve achieved impressive feats, from making the world our own, to reaching space and splitting the atom. 

如果沒有恐龍延續性的突然中斷，徹底改變了地球和地球上的所有生命，我們可能永遠不會有機會成為今天的我們。人類的時代將持續多久還不清楚。到目前為止，現代人類存在的時間只有恐龍存在時間的0.1%。在這短短的時間裏，我們取得了令人印象深刻的成就，從把世界變成我們自己的，如進入太空和分裂原子。

Yet our future and our long-term survival is not a given. If we are not careful, it could end in an instant, like the Age of the Dinosaurs ended. But in contrast to them, we know that our continuity is fragile, even if it doesn’t feel like it. We can be prepared and be vigilant and hopeful. If we are lucky, our journey will go on for a long, long time.

然而，我們的未來和長期生存並不是一成不變的。如果我們不小心，它可能會在一瞬間結束，就像恐龍時代的結束一樣。但與它們不同的是，我們知道我們的延續性是脆弱的，即使感覺不到這樣。我們可以做好準備，保持警惕並且充滿希望。如果我們幸運的話，我們的旅程將會持續很長很長的時間。