The Great Forgetting
I t had only snowed a dusting the day before, but my brother Jebsen had gone snowboarding at the local hill anyway.
前一天只下了一场雪，但我的兄弟捷成还是去当地的山上滑雪了。
He and his friends had discovered a secret spot behind a small shopping plaza in Saugerties, New York, where they would build jumps on an undeveloped hillside in the woods.
他和他的朋友们在纽约州索格蒂斯的一个小购物广场后面发现了一个秘密地点，他们将在那里的树林中未开发的山坡上建造跳台。
The packed piles of snow were more resistant to melting, so all they needed was a thin layer to freshen things up and they would disappear there for the day.
堆满的雪更难融化，所以他们只需要一层薄薄的雪就能让一切焕然一新，然后它们就会在那里消失一整天。
As my mother and I pulled up to the curb to pick him up, I noticed an unusual tiredness hung in his hunched shoulders.
当我和母亲把车停到路边接他时，我注意到他驼背的肩膀上挂着一种不同寻常的疲倦。
He had a dull stare that seemed to barely register our arrival, and his snowboard was sprawled halfway into the parking lot, as if he couldn’t be bothered to tend to it.
他眼神呆滞，似乎几乎没有注意到我们的到来，他的滑雪板半摊在停车场里，好像他懒得去照管它。
Slumping into the back seat, he complained of a headache.
他倒在后座上，抱怨头痛。
It came out a few miles down the road that he had hit his head on a rock and blacked out after going off one of the jumps.
沿着路走了几英里后，他在一次跳台后头撞到了一块岩石上，然后就昏了过去。
He said he wasn’t sure how long he was out for, but when he regained consciousness, he decided to shake it off and keep snowboarding with the guys for the rest of the day.
他说他不确定自己要缺席多久，但当他恢复知觉时，他决定摆脱这种状态，在当天剩下的时间里继续和队友们一起滑雪。
I could hear my mother’s deep inhalation, her eyes flipping up to assess him in the rearview mirror.
我能听到母亲深深的吸气声，她的眼睛向上翻着，从后视镜里打量着他。
“You probably have a concussion,” was her matter-of-fact assessment, masking the sudden tension that had set in.
“你可能得了脑震荡，”她实事求是地评价道，掩盖了突然出现的紧张情绪。
Back then, concussions were viewed as unfortunate but passing injuries, and Jebsen had many previous concussions that seemed to resolve just fine.
当时，脑震荡被视为不幸但短暂的伤害，而捷成之前也曾遭受过多次脑震荡，但似乎都得到了很好的解决。
Rather than view his prior record as a risk factor for more serious brain damage, it was easier to see it as evidence of resilience.
与其将他之前的记录视为更严重脑损伤的风险因素，不如将其视为恢复能力的证据。
“You should take it easy for a few days,” my mother said.
“你应该放松几天，”妈妈说。
At a stoplight, however, we noticed something different this time.
然而，在红绿灯处，这次我们注意到了一些不同的情况。
When my mother mentioned events of the previous day, Jebsen didn’t know what she was talking about.
当母亲提起前一天的事情时，捷成不知道她在说什么。
I laughed, thinking he was kidding, but when I swung my head back to exchange a smile with him, his face was slackened with confusion.
我笑了，以为他在开玩笑，但当我转过头与他交换微笑时，他的脸因困惑而松弛。
We volleyed back and forth on the way home, checking the big stuff first—names, people, places—until we homed in on the line that divided his intact memory from the events that had been swept clean: two weeks.
我们在回家的路上来来回回，首先检查了一些重要的东西——名字、人物、地点——直到我们找到了他完整的记忆与被清除的事件之间的界限：两周。
The past two weeks of his life had been eroded at a sharp contact, like an underwater turbidity current that sweeps off the topmost sediment as it barrels downslope.
他生命的过去两周在剧烈的接触中被侵蚀，就像水下的浊流在冲下斜坡时扫走了最上面的沉积物。
I was relieved that everything important, everything central to his identity, was still intact.
让我松了口气的是，所有重要的、对他身份至关重要的一切都完好无损。
On the surface, it seemed a minor loss, an otherwise mundane cache of daily routines.
从表面上看，这似乎是一个小小的损失，是日常生活中平凡的一件事。
But it would be a lie to omit the unease I felt emanating from that scarp in his memory.
但如果忽略我从他记忆中的那条悬崖中所感受到的不安，那将是一个谎言。
It was like a sinkhole that suddenly pockmarks the ground; we rope it off with caution tape and cones, trying to reassure ourselves that the dangers have been safely delineated.
它就像一个天坑，突然在地面上留下了坑坑洼洼的痕迹。我们用警示带和锥体把它围起来，试图让自己放心，危险已经被安全地描绘出来。
As a paleoclimatologist, my work revolves around the tenet that the past provides context and constraints for better understanding the future.
作为一名古气候学家，我的工作围绕这样的宗旨：过去为更好地理解未来提供了背景和限制。
Knowing how much the planet warmed when atmospheric carbon dioxide was as high or higher than it is today provides insight into the possible future trajectories of climate under rising greenhouse gases.
了解当大气中的二氧化碳含量与现在一样高或更高时地球变暖了多少，可以深入了解温室气体排放增加下未来气候可能的轨迹。
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Earth records provide us with this information: Ice cores, tree rings, ocean sediments, stalactites and stalagmites in caves, growth rings in corals, tusks, and mollusks.
地球记录为我们提供了这些信息：冰芯、树木年轮、海洋沉积物、洞穴中的钟乳石和石笋、珊瑚、象牙和软体动物的年轮。
These archives accrete memories on time periods varying from months to millions of years, allowing us to see a spectrum of Earth changes on various temporal and spatial scales—how biology, ocean, and ice respond to climate change in signature patterns, and the points at which those systems are pushed past thresholds.
这些档案积累了从几个月到数百万年不等的时间段的记忆，使我们能够看到地球在不同时间和空间尺度上的一系列变化——生物、海洋和冰如何以特征模式响应气候变化，以及这些系统被推过阈值的点。
This is one of the most important insights that paleoclimate archives provide: They show us how the real world breaks.
这是古气候档案提供的最重要的见解之一：它们向我们展示了现实世界是如何破裂的。
How resilience folds into catastrophic failure.
韧性如何演变成灾难性的失败。
They show us the edges and asymmetries of the climate system: the thresholds of tolerance in ecological networks; the slow steady slog of diversification and the quick ax of extinction; the long timescales it takes for ice sheets to grow—accumulating million-year memories—and how fast they can melt, puddling history into storm surges that erode the banks of our futures.
它们向我们展示了气候系统的边缘和不对称性：生态网络的容忍阈值；缓慢稳定的多样化进程和快速的灭绝；冰盖生长所需的漫长时间尺度——积累了数百万年的记忆——以及它们融化的速度有多快，将历史搅成风暴潮，侵蚀我们未来的银行。
As I watch the unfolding of extreme events across our planet, I find myself continuously relocated to that moment in the car with my brother.
当我看着地球上极端事件的发生时，我发现自己不断地回到与我兄弟一起在车里的那一刻。
The sense of fracturing that ripples from a single shock event, even if the full extent of damage is yet to reveal itself.
即使损坏的全部程度尚未显现出来，单次冲击事件也会带来破裂感。
We didn’t go to the hospital that day after my brother’s snowboarding accident.
我哥哥滑雪事故发生后那天我们没有去医院。
We went home instead.
我们反而回家了。
My mother cooked dinner.
我妈妈煮了晚饭。
Jebsen retreated to his room to lie down.
捷成回到自己的房间躺下。
But from that point on, he continued to retreat farther and farther from us.
但从那时起，他就离我们越来越远了。
The signs were subtle at first.
起初，这些迹象很微妙。
He lost weight.
他体重减轻了。
He became more withdrawn, more angry about the world’s injustices, but it was hard to tease out what was the normal moodiness of a teenager and what veered off into stranger territory.
他变得更加孤僻，对世界上的不公正更加愤怒，但很难弄清楚什么是青少年的正常情绪，什么是转向陌生的领域。
He had been reading Krishnamurti at the time, and he seemed to take on the mantle of an ascetic—most acutely with food and eating, which he suddenly viewed as a grotesque act of consumption.
当时他正在阅读克里希那穆提的著作，他似乎披上了苦行僧的外衣——对食物和饮食的态度最为强烈，他突然认为这是一种怪异的消费行为。
I tried to be an ally, but everything I did was wrong—the simple act of eating dinner disgusted him.
我试图成为一个盟友，但我所做的一切都是错的——吃晚饭这个简单的行为就让他感到厌恶。
One day, I came into the kitchen and saw him pouring orange juice onto our potted orange tree.
有一天，我走进厨房，看到他把橙汁倒在我们盆栽的橙树上。
When I asked what he was doing, he told me the tree would grow better if given more of the nutrients it needed to produce its fruit.
当我问他在做什么时，他告诉我，如果给予树更多结出果实所需的养分，这棵树会长得更好。
“I don’t know if that’s how it works,” I said, a younger sister still afraid to contradict her older brother.
“我不知道是不是这样，”我说，妹妹仍然不敢反驳她的哥哥。
“It might not be good for the soil.” He looked at me for a long time from across the room, more in pity than rebuff, and I could feel his eyes starting to perceive me as an outsider instead of a sibling who had shared the same chaotic upbringing.
“这可能对土壤不利。”他从房间的另一边看了我很长时间，更多的是怜悯而不是拒绝，我能感觉到他的眼睛开始将我视为局外人，而不是一个有着同样混乱成长经历的兄弟姐妹。
On weekends, the two of us would still go to the junkyard where we grew up to work odd jobs for my father.
周末，我们两个人仍然会去我们从小长大的垃圾场，为父亲打零工。
But Jebsen became increasingly unreliable, unfocused, and when my father found him huffing gasoline one day, he kicked him off the junkyard and told him he wasn’t allowed back until he got his act together.
但捷成变得越来越不可靠、注意力不集中，有一天，当我父亲发现他喘着粗气时，他把他从垃圾场踢了出去，并告诉他，除非他振作起来，否则他不准回来。
My father thought it would shock the sense back into him, but for Jebsen it severed a touchstone of his identity.
我父亲认为这会震撼他的感觉，但对捷成来说，这切断了他身份的试金石。
As kids, the two of us were often left to navigate the treacherous, lost world realms of the junkyard together—acres of vine-encrusted carapaces of old cars, broken school buses, and rotting wooden ships, all scattered around the swamp and bluestone cliffs that ran through our property in upstate New York.
当我们还是孩子的时候，我们两个人经常被留下一起在垃圾场的危险、失落的世界中航行——占地数英亩的藤蔓覆盖的旧汽车外壳、破损的校车和腐烂的木船，所有这些都散落在沼泽和青石悬崖周围，这些悬崖穿过我们位于纽约州北部的房产。
We pillaged for presents for my mother in trunks of cars and burned-out trailers.
我们在汽车后备箱和烧毁的拖车里抢夺礼物送给母亲。
We skated the swamp in winter, shoveling labyrinthine paths around the trees and root islands.
冬天，我们在沼泽里滑冰，在树木和根岛周围铲出迷宫般的小路。
We pretended to drive the crumpled convertibles and sail the ships that slowly filled with the soil of fallen leaves.
我们假装驾驶着皱巴巴的敞篷车，驾驶着慢慢装满落叶泥土的船只。
As hostile a place it may have seemed to outsiders, to us the junkyard was an island of consistency, a comforting place with the aging faces of the cars that had stood watch over our childhoods.
在外人看来，垃圾场可能是一个充满敌意的地方，但对我们来说，垃圾场却是一个稳定的岛屿，一个令人舒适的地方，那里有那些守护着我们童年的汽车的老化面孔。
To be banished from the junkyard was to send my brother out to sea.
被逐出垃圾场就意味着将我的兄弟送出海。
In geology, an “unconformity” represents an aberration in the normal accumulation of sediment, a glitch in the record-keeping of Earth’s history.
在地质学中，“不整合面”代表沉积物正常积累的异常，是地球历史记录中的一个小故障。
“A stratum of amnesia in the geological record, where overlying rock, significantly younger than what lies below, represents some break in an otherwise continuous story of formation,” is how writer and poet Kim Stafford defined it.
“地质记录中的失忆地层，上面的岩石比下面的岩石年轻得多，代表着原本连续的形成故事中的一些中断，”作家兼诗人金·斯塔福德 (Kim Stafford) 如此定义。
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The longest lacuna in Earth’s history is known as the Great Unconformity.
地球历史上最长的缺口被称为大不整合面。
It represents a temporal gap ranging from a hundred million years to over a billion years, depending on the location.
它代表了从一亿年到十亿年以上的时间差距，具体取决于位置。
It’s visible in the Grand Canyon as the boundary between the Precambrian Vishnu Schist and the Cambrian Tapeats Sandstone, between which there is a billion years of missing time between about 1,600 and 600 million years ago.
它在大峡谷中清晰可见，是前寒武纪毗湿奴片岩和寒武纪锥状砂岩之间的边界，在大约 1,600 至 6 亿年前之间，有 10 亿年的时间缺失。
Looking at this line in the strata, it is hard to fathom all that would have conspired across that vast gulf of time, for which there is simply nothing .
看着地层中的这条线，很难理解跨越这片时间鸿沟的一切，根本就没有任何东西。
If it were instead to have been the last billion years that was erased, it would obliterate the entire history of complex life.
如果抹去的是最后十亿年，那么复杂生命的整个历史就会被抹掉。
No trace of a single animal having ever walked the land.
没有任何动物曾在这片土地上行走过。
No dinosaurs, no whales, no humans, no pyramids.
没有恐龙，没有鲸鱼，没有人类，没有金字塔。
How does a billion years go missing?
十亿年是如何消失的？
The Great Unconformity has long been a geological mystery, in no small part because it is a challenge to reconstruct history when records of history are missing.
大不整合面长期以来一直是一个地质谜团，很大程度上是因为在历史记录缺失的情况下重建历史是一个挑战。
He left, disappearing into the autumn chill without so much as a warm jacket.
他离开了，消失在秋日的寒冷中，连一件保暖的夹克都没有穿。
It turns out, ice sheets are good shredders.
事实证明，冰盖是很好的粉碎机。
Recent research 3 suggests that the Great Unconformity may be a result of Snowball Earth—when the planet descended into deep cold (about 700 million years ago), and glaciers covered most of the land.
最近的研究 3 表明，大不整合面可能是雪球地球的结果——当时地球陷入深冷（大约 7 亿年前），冰川覆盖了大部分土地。
A billion years of history was ground down by ice and bulldozed into the seafloor, where it was subducted into the Earth’s mantle and recycled into magma, ready to be remade into new history—albeit with a few hidden remnants of the past stored safely away in subterranean crystals.
十亿年的历史被冰磨碎并推入海底，在那里它被潜入地幔并回收成岩浆，准备重新创造新的历史——尽管过去的一些隐藏的残余物安全地储存在地下晶体中。
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While the erosive action of ice sheets may have been responsible for the largest unconformity in the Earth’s lithosphere, ice sheets themselves are some of the best memory banks on our planet.
虽然冰盖的侵蚀作用可能是造成地球岩石圈最大不整合面的原因，但冰盖本身就是我们星球上最好的记忆库之一。
Greenland stores over 100,000 years of history.
格陵兰岛拥有超过10万年的历史。
Antarctica stores over a million.
南极洲的储量超过一百万。
These ice sheets are written by the daily weather, each snowstorm condensed into the jagged rhythms of ice age cycles that steadily build into mile-high mountains—the great brains of our planet, perched on the poles.
这些冰盖是由日常天气书写的，每场暴风雪都凝结成冰河时代周期的锯齿状节奏，逐渐形成一英里高的山脉——我们星球的伟大大脑，栖息在两极。
Ice sheets can recall the large volcanic eruptions that occurred throughout their lifetimes and the turn of the weather those years.
冰盖可以让人回想起其一生中发生的大型火山喷发以及那些年的天气变化。
Antarctica remembers the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere 800,000 years ago and its natural variations since—the consistently bounded maximums and minimums of glacial and interglacial cycles, 5 and the harrowing departure from those bounds in recent decades.
南极洲记得 80 万年前大气中的二氧化碳含量以及此后的自然变化——冰川和间冰期循环始终有界的最大值和最小值，5 以及近几十年来令人痛心地偏离这些界限。
6 Greenland remembers when Romans started smelting silver, as the toxic lead dust settled over the ice; it knows too when Rome fell, from the cessation of this dust.
6 格陵兰岛记得罗马人开始冶炼银时，有毒的铅尘沉积在冰上；从尘埃的停止，它也知道罗马何时陷落。
7 Information is best preserved on ice.
7 信息最好保存在冰上。
But the world’s glaciers are now hemorrhaging their histories.
但世界上的冰川现在正在流失它们的历史。
Mountain glaciers are peeling at their edges like smoldering paper, while Greenland sweats off a million tons a minute.
高山冰川的边缘像闷烧的纸一样剥落，而格陵兰岛每分钟流汗一百万吨。
8 On bad days, it is enough water to submerge entire states.
8 天气不好的时候，水足以淹没整个州。
9 Between 1994 and 2017, 30 trillion tons of ice have been lost globally, 10 and things are just starting to heat up.
9 1994 年至 2017 年间，全球消失了 30 万亿吨冰，10 而且情况才刚刚开始升温。
In August of 2021, it rained on the summit of Greenland.
2021年8月，格陵兰岛山顶下着雨。
A melt layer will form to mark the event—a dire sign for the top of an ice sheet.
融化层将会形成，标志着这一事件——这是冰盖顶部的可怕征兆。
Coastal areas along Greenland have become too slushy to drill into, preventing scientists from retrieving ice cores in those regions, rendering its history inaccessible.
格陵兰岛沿岸地区已经变得太泥泞，无法钻探，科学家们无法在这些地区取回冰芯，从而无法了解其历史。
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Antarctica has been the slowest beast to awaken, but the icy tentacles that reach out to moor the giant are starting to slip.
南极洲是苏醒最慢的野兽，但伸出来停泊这头巨人的冰冷触手正开始滑落。
These floating ice shelves extend out from where the ice sheet is grounded to the bedrock, helping to stabilize the interior, but now they are starting to weaken from the forces of ocean warming and rising seas.
这些漂浮的冰架从冰盖接地的地方延伸到基岩，有助于稳定内部，但现在它们开始因海洋变暖和海平面上升的力量而减弱。
As the ice shelves disintegrate into the ocean, the ice upstream accelerates its descent, increasing sea level.
随着冰架崩解入海洋，上游的冰加速下降，导致海平面上升。
In 2022, double heat waves hit the Arctic and Antarctic, temperatures soaring close to 40 degrees Celsius higher than usual.
2022年，双重热浪袭击北极和南极，气温比平常高出近40摄氏度。
The Conger ice shelf in East Antarctica said its final farewell following this heat wave.
南极洲东部的康格冰架在这场热浪之后宣告了最后的告别。
West Antarctica has long been considered the more vulnerable to near-term ice shelf loss, but now, even the East is starting to show its fray.
长期以来，南极洲西部地区一直被认为更容易受到短期冰架消失的影响，但现在，即使是东部地区也开始出现问题。
Heat makes easy work of forgetting.
炎热使遗忘变得容易。
Months went by as my brother’s condition continued to deteriorate, but all attempts to get him to see a doctor had failed.
几个月过去了，我哥哥的病情持续恶化，但所有让他去看医生的尝试都失败了。
When he turned 18, my mother couldn’t force him to go despite her efforts.
当他18岁的时候，尽管我母亲很努力，但还是无法强迫他去。
Emaciated from self-starvation, his head bent over, he looked like a ghost of his former self.
他因饥饿而憔悴，低着头，看上去就像是以前的自己的鬼魂。
Any attempts to nudge him toward help were met with slammed doors and further retreat.
任何试图推动他寻求帮助的尝试都会遭到关上的大门和进一步的撤退。
As I came back home one day from a hike in the woods, I noticed a wall of blackberries covering an old fence at the campground next to our property.
有一天，当我在树林里徒步旅行回家时，我注意到我们家旁边的露营地的旧栅栏上覆盖着一堵黑莓墙。
I remember the distinct feeling of hope I had at the sight of them, the momentary illusion of a solution.
我记得当我看到他们时，我有一种明显的希望感，一种解决方案的短暂幻想。
I thought Jebsen would gladly eat the berries because they were wild and didn’t cost anything, so I hurried home and got a colander to collect them.
我以为捷成会很乐意吃这些浆果，因为它们是野生的，而且不花任何钱，所以我赶紧回家拿了一个漏勺来收集它们。
I knocked on his bedroom door, my colander full to the brim of blackberries.
我敲了敲他卧室的门，我的漏勺里装满了黑莓。
“Look what I found across the street,” I said, holding out the berries as a peace offering.
“看看我在街对面发现了什么，”我一边说，一边递出浆果作为和平祭品。
He looked up at me and met my eyes for the first time in months.
他抬头看着我，这是几个月来第一次与我对视。
“What will the birds eat?” he asked, searching for my decency.
“鸟儿吃什么？”他问，寻找我的体面。
So I took the colander full of berries and flung them back outside, along with my hopes of him getting better.
于是我拿起装满浆果的滤锅，把它们扔回外面，同时也希望他能好起来。
By autumn, my mother gave him an ultimatum: Go to the doctor or move out of the house.
到了秋天，我母亲给他下了最后通牒：要么去看医生，要么搬出家门。
He left instead, disappearing into the autumn chill without so much as a warm jacket.
他却离开了，消失在秋日的寒冷中，连一件保暖的夹克都没有穿。
A few weeks later, my mother found him living in our uninsulated outdoor basement.
几周后，我母亲发现他住在我们不隔热的室外地下室里。
He had been sleeping on the ground next to the water heater, surrounded by mouse traps.
他一直睡在热水器旁边的地上，周围都是老鼠夹。
She took him back in, thankful he was alive.
她把他带了回来，庆幸他还活着。
We hobbled along for a few more months, in the limbo of knowing something had to give.
我们又一瘸一拐地走了几个月，因为我们知道必须放弃一些东西。
Finally, one night my mother told me, “It’s going to happen tomorrow.
最后，有一天晚上，我妈妈告诉我：“明天就会发生。
Uncle Bill is coming.
比尔叔叔来了。
And dad.
还有爸爸。
The police will come.” When I got off the school bus that day, Jebsen wasn’t home.
警察会来的。”那天我下校车时，捷成并不在家。
He had been committed to a psychiatric hospital.
他已被送进精神病院。
I asked my mother what happened, but she just shook her head.
我问妈妈发生了什么事，但她只是摇摇头。
“They had to restrain him,” was all she said.
“他们必须限制他，”她只说了这么一句话。
In the following days, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
接下来的几天，他被诊断出患有精神分裂症。
In the biosphere, resilience is deeply entwined with memory—it is the ability of a system to find its way back to an equilibrium state following a perturbation, which requires memory of previous states.
在生物圈中，复原力与记忆紧密相连——它是系统在扰动后找到回到平衡状态的能力，这需要对先前状态的记忆。
For example, ecological memory in forest ecosystems can be thought of as containing “information and material legacies” that map out adaptive strategies to disturbances such as fire, drought, or temperature changes.
例如，森林生态系统中的生态记忆可以被认为包含“信息和物质遗产”，可以制定针对火灾、干旱或温度变化等干扰的适应性策略。
12 Material legacies include seeds that sprout after a fire and dead logs that become home to plants and fungi.
12 物质遗产包括火灾后发芽的种子和成为植物和真菌家园的死木。
Material legacies, however, can be lost or diminished as environmental conditions change.
然而，随着环境条件的变化，物质遗产可能会丢失或减少。
Often those changes are driven by humans, such as the extinction of species or the introduction of invasive ones.
这些变化通常是由人类驱动的，例如物种灭绝或入侵物种的引入。
Those changes can generate a “resilience debt,” the reduced capacity of a system to recover.
这些变化可能会产生“弹性债务”，即系统恢复能力下降。
That debt, though, is apparent only after an ecosystem is disturbed.
然而，这种债务只有在生态系统受到干扰后才会显现出来。
Given that ecosystems naturally respond slowly to environmental changes, from decades to centuries, those changes to observers may be mistaken for resilience, making it difficult to predict future responses to new perturbations.
鉴于生态系统自然地对环境变化做出缓慢的反应，从几十年到几个世纪，观察者可能会误认为这些变化是恢复力，从而很难预测未来对新扰动的反应。
The importance of memory isn’t just in the information it contains.
记忆的重要性不仅仅在于它所包含的信息。
In the Earth System, components with large memories act as buffers to short-term variability.
在地球系统中，具有大内存的组件充当短期变化的缓冲区。
They are a form of inertia, slowing the initial response to a perturbation.
它们是一种惯性，会减慢对扰动的初始响应。
Oceans absorb atmospheric heat and carbon dioxide; forests cool their environments through carbon uptake and evapotranspiration, a process that transfers water back into the atmosphere and helps to stabilize the hydrological cycle.
海洋吸收大气热量和二氧化碳；森林通过碳吸收和蒸散来冷却环境，这一过程将水转移回大气中，有助于稳定水文循环。
13 Ice sheets keep the planet cool through their high albedo, a measurement of how much light is reflected by their surface.
13 冰盖通过其高反照率（衡量冰盖表面反射光量的指标）使地球保持凉爽。
As the ice sheets melt, more solar radiation is absorbed by Earth, driving up temperatures and increasing melting in a positive feedback.
随着冰盖融化，更多的太阳辐射被地球吸收，从而推高温度并加速融化，形成正反馈。
But the complexity of memory is also what sets it up for failure when it is pushed past its limits.
但记忆的复杂性也是导致其在超出其极限时失败的原因。
The same structure that can stabilize in the face of small perturbations, can topple catastrophically when the rates and magnitudes of change become too great.
同样的结构在面对小扰动时可以保持稳定，但当变化的速度和幅度太大时，可能会发生灾难性的崩溃。
Before a tipping point in a complex system, there are early warning signals that may be detected.
在复杂系统达到临界点之前，可能会检测到早期预警信号。
14 The most widely applicable of these early warning signals is “critical slowing down”—the phenomenon we are all familiar with before our computer crashes, and rather than heed the implications of this slower processing power, we jam at the keys in frustration, doubling down on our demands until the computer blacks out.
14 这些预警信号中应用最广泛的是“严重减速”——在计算机崩溃之前我们都熟悉这种现象，我们没有注意到处理能力较慢的影响，而是沮丧地按着按键，加倍我们的要求，直到计算机停止运行。
These are the times information is most likely to be lost if it hasn’t been secured in long-term storage.
如果信息没有得到长期存储的保护，这些时候信息最有可能丢失。
Critical slowing down indicates the system is losing its ability to attain its previous equilibrium and is instead becoming attracted or pulled into an alternate state.
严重减速表明系统正在失去达到先前平衡的能力，而是被吸引或拉入另一种状态。
It is a loss of resilience, a loss of the negative feedbacks that help keep a system rooted in stability.
这是一种弹性的丧失，一种有助于保持系统稳定的负面反馈的丧失。
Various subsystems that are sensitive to thresholds—such as the Amazon rainforest—are already showing signs of critical slowing down.
对阈值敏感的各种子系统（例如亚马逊雨林）已经显示出严重放缓的迹象。
15
15
Given the complexity of the Earth System, it is hard to fathom the extent of information loss currently underway.
鉴于地球系统的复杂性，很难了解目前正在发生的信息丢失的程度。
There are, however, attempts to quantify the memory loss in the Earth System.
然而，有人试图量化地球系统的记忆丧失。
In one model, where anthropogenic CO 2 emissions are the stressor, and the strain on the system is the ability of the land and ocean to sequester carbon, researchers show the latter is inherently slower than the former.
在一个模型中，人为CO 2 排放是压力源，系统的压力是陆地和海洋固碳的能力，研究人员表明，后者本质上比前者慢。
They estimate that 60 percent of Earth’s memory had already been degraded by 1959, and that the ability for Earth to build-up memory has been impaired, reducing its capacity to respond to stresses within its natural stress-strain regime.
他们估计，到 1959 年，地球 60% 的记忆已经退化，地球建立记忆的能力已经受损，从而降低了其在自然应力应变范围内应对压力的能力。
16 Estimates of persistence in this model—akin to critical slowing down—are increasing, signaling a departure from the bounds of Earth’s natural regime well before 2050, if the stressors of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide continue their current trajectory.
16 该模型对持续性的估计（类似于临界减速）正在增加，这表明如果大气中二氧化碳上升的压力源继续其当前的轨迹，那么早在 2050 年之前就会偏离地球自然状态的界限。
The ocean is undergoing memory loss too, increasing variability and reducing predictability of future temperature patterns.
海洋也在经历记忆丧失，增加了变化性并降低了未来温度模式的可预测性。
17
17 号
The intractable problem we face is the asymmetry of timescales: It takes time to build memory, but it can be erased in a geological instant.
我们面临的棘手问题是时间尺度的不对称：建立记忆需要时间，但它可以在地质瞬间被抹去。
Like so many things we take for granted, it is difficult to see these stabilizing forces until they are gone.
就像许多我们认为理所当然的事情一样，在这些稳定力量消失之前很难看到它们。
As we untether the anchors of the past, the future becomes unmoored.
当我们解开过去的锚时，未来就会失去锚定。
Jebsen’s health and memory continued to deteriorate.
捷成的健康状况和记忆力持续恶化。
During one low point, he stopped taking his medications and was kicked out of the house where he had been living.
在一段低潮时期，他停止服药，并被赶出了他一直居住的房子。
For weeks he was homeless, somewhere in the woods of Phoenicia, not answering calls.
几个星期以来，他无家可归，在腓尼基森林的某个地方，没有接听电话。
When he resurfaced, my cousin, aunts, uncles, and half-brothers pooled resources to put him up in a motel.
当他重新出现时，我的表弟、阿姨、叔叔和同父异母的兄弟集合资源把他安置在一家汽车旅馆里。
I was on the West Coast, with a young child, unable to visit often.
我在西海岸，带着一个小孩，无法经常去看望。
But we talked on the phone regularly.
但我们经常通电话。
I could hear in his voice that his health was worsening, but he made me promise not to get the doctors involved anymore.
我从他的声音中听出他的健康状况正在恶化，但他让我保证不再让医生介入。
Every time we talked, he would recount the same few stories, as if everything else had been whittled away, leaving only the unerodable core of his memories.
每次我们谈话时，他都会讲述同样的几个故事，仿佛其他一切都被削去了，只留下记忆中不可磨灭的核心。
Most were from the early days, the junkyard days.
大多数都是早期的垃圾场时代的。
Many involved some sort of peril—the time I got stuck in my father’s van, rolling backward down our driveway as Jebsen ran alongside, urging me to jump out the window, or the time my father’s finger got sliced off by a falling car window and he asked Jebsen to go get some paper towels from the house.
其中很多都涉及到某种危险——有一次我被困在父亲的货车里，在车道上向后滚动，而捷成则跑到旁边，催促我从车窗跳出去；或者有一次我父亲的手指被掉落的车窗划伤，他让捷成去家里拿一些纸巾。
He would end the story by saying, “Uh, Dad, I think you’re going to need more than paper towels,” and we would both laugh.
他会在故事结束时说：“呃，爸爸，我想你需要的不仅仅是纸巾，”我们都会笑。
A few months before his 39th birthday, Jebsen died of cirrhosis.
就在 39 岁生日前几个月，捷成因肝硬化去世。
The bounds of Earth’s memory are being severely tested.
地球记忆的界限正在受到严峻的考验。
Biodiversity is in stark decline.
生物多样性急剧下降。
18 Complex ecosystems that contain libraries of genetic information—potential medicine cabinets for ailments yet unleashed—are being degraded into monocrops.
18 包含遗传信息库（尚未释放的潜在疾病药柜）的复杂生态系统正在退化为单一作物。
Rates of extinction in recent decades are 10 to 100 times greater than the last 10 million years and over 1 million species face extinction in the coming decades.
近几十年来的灭绝速度是过去 1000 万年的 10 至 100 倍，超过 100 万个物种在未来几十年面临灭绝。
Extinction represents the ultimate memory loss: an end of the line for information that had been continuously transcribed in the Earth’s living library for hundreds of millions of years.
灭绝代表着最终的记忆丧失：数亿年来在地球生命图书馆中不断转录的信息的终结。
Wildfires are razing ancient forests and entire towns—thousand-year histories contained in towering redwoods mixed with decades of human history, billowing in pyrocumulous clouds that puncture the stratosphere like volcanic eruptions.
野火正在夷平古老的森林和整个城镇——高耸的红杉中蕴藏着数千年的历史，与数十年的人类历史混合在一起，在火积云中翻腾，像火山喷发一样刺穿平流层。
These charred landscapes are everywhere in California: Burn scars reach from the Santa Cruz Mountains to the ocean.
这些烧焦的景观在加利福尼亚州随处可见：烧伤疤痕从圣克鲁斯山脉一直延伸到海洋。
The ridges of northern Sonoma look like a shaved dog’s back of bristled matchsticks.
索诺玛北部的山脊看起来就像是一根被毛火柴棍剃光的狗背。
Crows perch in black snaggle Manzanita.
乌鸦栖息在黑色的曼扎尼塔上。
Charcoal limbs are scattered at broken bone angles through the Echo Summit pass, the only evidence of the houses that once stood are the stone chimneys standing in ashes, like ancient cairns in abandoned landscapes.
木炭的肢体以断骨的角度散落在回声峰山口，曾经矗立的房屋的唯一证据是灰烬中矗立的石烟囱，就像废弃景观中的古老石堆。
Everywhere on Earth, amnesia is smoldering.
地球上的每个地方，失忆症都在闷烧。
Ash from our most ancient libraries is raining down on us, lofted into toxic smoke that circles the globe, darkening glaciers that accelerate their melting, sending thousands of years of history pouring into the ocean, where it steadily rises up to erode the banks of our futures.
我们最古老图书馆的灰烬如雨点般落在我们身上，化为环绕地球的有毒烟雾，使冰川变暗，加速融化，将数千年的历史注入海洋，在那里它稳步上升，侵蚀我们未来的银行。
Those who can’t shake the shivers of ill ease are the ones who have always sought wisdom from the past, and suddenly there is an eerie silence—stumps of history, no longer talking back.
那些无法摆脱不安的颤抖的人，是那些总是从过去寻求智慧的人，突然间出现了一种令人毛骨悚然的沉默——历史的树桩，不再顶嘴。
While I can never know whether the snowboarding accident was directly linked to Jebsen’s schizophrenia, when I think back to the tragic turn of his trajectory, I fixate on that moment in the car when he first showed signs of amnesia.
虽然我永远无法知道那次滑雪事故是否与捷成的精神分裂症直接相关，但当我回想起他人生轨迹的悲惨转折时，我的脑海里浮现出他第一次出现失忆迹象时在车里的那一刻。
I fixate on our immobility; on the lack of actions we took to assess the larger damages that may have been hiding beneath that hole in his memory.
我专注于我们一动不动；由于我们没有采取行动来评估可能隐藏在他记忆漏洞之下的更大损害。
It wasn’t for lack of concern, but a lack of money that kept us away from hospitals, and an excess of momentum that kept us rutted in the daily grind.
并不是因为缺乏关心，而是因为缺钱而无法去医院，而过度的动力让我们在日常的苦差事中陷入困境。
I plead with my former self to encourage my mother to take him to the hospital.
我恳求以前的自己鼓励妈妈带他去医院。
I even imagine that I am the source of ill ease I felt that day, peering back at my past with such unforgiving that I have burned a hole straight through spacetime.
我什至想象我就是那天感到不安的根源，以如此无情的态度回顾我的过去，以至于我在时空上烧出了一个洞。
Even if we couldn’t have changed the outcome, we would have tried, and maybe we would have been more prepared for what was to come.
即使我们无法改变结果，我们也会尝试，也许我们会对即将发生的事情做好更充分的准备。
We wouldn’t have ignored the troubling signs that were easy to overlook in their progressive slippage, until one day, he was skin and bones, hunched and mumbling, unable to look me in the eye, and all I could ask myself was: How could I not have seen it all unfolding?
我们不会忽视那些在逐渐滑落过程中很容易被忽视的令人不安的迹象，直到有一天，他瘦得皮包骨头，驼着背，咕哝着，无法直视我的眼睛，我只能问自己：我怎么可能没有看到这一切的展开？
The answer is that I did see it, but I wanted those warning signs to be aberrations; I wanted to believe in the limitlessness of resilience.
答案是我确实看到了，但我希望这些警告信号是异常现象；我想相信韧性是无限的。
Near the end of Jebsen’s life, he shared one memory that was different from all the other stories he normally retold.
在捷成生命即将结束时，他分享了一段与他通常讲述的其他故事不同的记忆。
It was about a road trip from Oregon to Northern California with my mother and me—the only time he ventured west.
这是关于我和母亲从俄勒冈州到北加州的一次公路旅行——这是他唯一一次冒险西部。
We were headed to Mt. Shasta but made a diversion to Humboldt Redwoods State Park to see the giant trees.
我们本来要去沙斯塔山，但改道去了洪堡红杉州立公园去看这些巨树。
What I remember from that day was how quiet Jebsen was, and I assumed he was anxious from the challenges of traveling.
从那天起，我记得捷成是多么安静，我猜想他因旅行的挑战而感到焦虑。
But in one of our final conversations, he recounted vivid details of driving through the Avenue of Giants, the tallest trees in the world.
但在我们最后一次谈话中，他生动地讲述了开车穿过巨人大道（世界上最高的树）的细节。
I was surprised by the clarity of this memory and mentioned how I had interpreted his silence as disinterest at the time.
我对这段记忆的清晰感到惊讶，并提到我当时如何将他的沉默解释为不感兴趣。
He corrected me, saying, “No, those trees were just the most amazing things I’d ever seen in my life.”
他纠正我说：“不，那些树只是我一生中见过的最神奇的东西。”
Summer Praetorius is a paleoclimatologist who uses ocean sediment records and marine microfossils to reconstruct past changes in ocean circulation and climate.
Summer Praetorius 是一位古气候学家，他利用海洋沉积物记录和海洋微化石来重建过去海洋环流和气候的变化。
Her work focuses on understanding the causes and effects of abrupt climate change in the Northern Hemisphere, with a focus on the Pacific Ocean.
她的工作重点是了解北半球气候突变的原因和影响，重点是太平洋。
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Carrington, D.
卡林顿，D.
The Greenland ice sheet lost a record 1m tonnes of ice per minute.
格陵兰冰盖每分钟损失的冰量达到创纪录的 100 万吨。
The Guardian (2020).
《卫报》（2020）。
9.
9.
Milman, O.
米尔曼，O.
Greenland: Enough ice melted on single day to cover Florida in two inches of water.
格陵兰岛：一天内融化的冰足以将佛罗里达州淹没在两英寸深的水中。
The Guardian (2021).
《卫报》（2021）。
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Slater, T., et al.
斯莱特，T.，等人。
Review article: Earth’s ice imbalance.
评论文章：地球的冰失衡。
The Cryosphere 15 , 233–246 (2021).
冰冻圈 15, 233–246 (2021)。
11.
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Garrison, C., Baldwin, C., & Hernandez, M.
加里森，C.，鲍德温，C.，＆埃尔南德斯，M.
Scientists scramble to harvest ice cores as glaciers melt.
随着冰川融化，科学家们争先恐后地收集冰芯。
Reuters (2021).
路透社（2021）。
12.
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Johnstone, J.F., et al.
约翰斯通，J.F.，等人。
Changing disturbance regimes, ecological memory, and forest resilience.
改变干扰机制、生态记忆和森林恢复力。
Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 14 , 369–378 (2016).
生态与环境前沿 14, 369–378 (2016)。
13.
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Makarieva, A.M., et al.
马卡里耶娃，A.M.，等人。
Vegetation impact on atmospheric moisture transport under increasing land-ocean temperature contrasts.
陆地-海洋温度对比增加时植被对大气水分输送的影响。
Heliyon 8 , e11173 (2022).
Heliyon 8，e11173 (2022)。
14.
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Scheffer M., et al.
谢弗 M.，等人。
Early-warning signals for critical transitions.
关键转变的预警信号。
Nature 461 , 53–59 (2009).
自然 461, 53–59 (2009)。
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Boulton, C.A., Lenton, T.M., & Boers, N.
加利福尼亚州博尔顿、T.M. 伦顿和北卡罗来纳州博尔斯
Pronounced loss of Amazon rainforest resilience since the early 2000s.
自 2000 年代初以来，亚马逊雨林的恢复能力明显丧失。
Nature Climate Change 12 , 271-278 (2022).
《自然·气候变化》12，271-278（2022）。
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Jonas, M.、Bun, R.、Ryzha, I. 和 Zebrowski, P.
Quantifying memory and persistence in the atmosphere-land and ocean carbon system.
量化大气-陆地和海洋碳系统的记忆和持久性。
Earth System Dynamics 13 , 439-455 (2022).
地球系统动力学 13, 439-455 (2022)。
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石，H.，等人。
Global decline in ocean memory over the 21st century.
21 世纪全球海洋记忆衰退。
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科学进展 8，eabm3468 (2022)。
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迪亚兹，S.，等人。
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生物多样性和生态系统服务政府间科学政策平台生物多样性和生态系统服务全球评估报告决策者摘要。
IPBES.net (2019).
IPBES.net (2019)。
Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the very brightest living thinkers.
尖端科学，由当今最聪明的思想家揭示。
You’ve read your 2 free articles this month.
您本月已阅读 2 篇免费文章。
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成为 Nautilus 会员即可访问无限的无广告故事，包括本篇。
Don’t limit your curiosity.
不要限制你的好奇心。
Access unlimited ad-free stories like this one, and support independent journalism, by becoming a Nautilus member.
成为 Nautilus 会员，即可访问无限量的无广告故事（如本篇），并支持独立新闻业。
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