When the Arctic Melts
In the middle of the night in the middle of the summer in the middle of the Greenland ice sheet, I woke to find myself with a blinding headache.
仲夏时节的半夜，在格陵兰岛冰原中部，我醒来发现自己头痛欲裂。
An anxious person living in anxious times, I’ve had plenty of headaches, but this one felt different, as if someone had taken a mallet to my sinuses.
作为一个生活在焦虑时代的焦虑者，我有过很多头痛的经历，但这次感觉不同，就像有人用木槌敲击我的鼻窦一样。
I’d flown up to the ice the previous afternoon, to a research station owned and operated by the National Science Foundation.
前一天下午，我飞到了冰面上，来到了美国国家科学基金会拥有和运营的一个研究站。
The station, called Summit, sits ten thousand five hundred and thirty feet above sea level.
该站名为“峰会”，海拔一万五百三十英尺。
The first person I’d met upon arriving was the resident doctor, who warned me and a few other newcomers to expect to experience altitude sickness.
我到达后遇到的第一个人是住院医生，他警告我和其他一些新来者要做好高原反应的准备。
In most cases, he said, this would produce only passing, hangover-like symptoms; on occasion, though, it could result in brain swelling and death.
他说，在大多数情况下，这只会产生短暂的、类似宿醉的症状。但有时，它可能会导致脑肿胀和死亡。
Belatedly, I realized that I’d neglected to ask how to tell the difference.
事后我才意识到我忽略了询问如何区分两者。
N.S.F.
美国国家科学基金会
Summit Station—according to the agency’s many rules, this is how visiting journalists are required to refer to the place—was erected in the late nineteen-eighties.
峰会站——根据该机构的许多规定，来访的记者必须这样称呼这个地方——建于十九世纪八十年代末。
Initially, it was occupied only in the summer; now a small crew remains through the winter, when, at Summit’s latitude—seventy-two degrees north—the sun never clears the horizon.
最初，这里只在夏季有人居住。现在，一小群人留下来过冬，在萨米特的纬度（北纬七十二度），太阳永远不会离开地平线。
The station’s main structure is known as the Big House.
车站的主体结构被称为“大房子”。
It resembles a double-wide trailer and teeters almost thirty feet above the ice, on metal pilings.
它类似于一辆双宽拖车，在冰面上方近三十英尺的金属桩上摇摇欲坠。
Arrayed around it are a weather station, also elevated on pilings; a couple of very chilly outhouses; several tanks of jet fuel; and an emergency shelter that’s shaped like a watermelon and called the Tomato.
它周围排列着一个气象站，也是用桩子高高地架起来的。几个非常寒冷的户外厕所；几箱喷气燃料；还有一个形状像西瓜、名为“番茄”的紧急避难所。
Some of the station’s residents used to sleep in tents, but a few years ago a polar bear showed up, so the tents have been replaced by metal sheds.
车站的一些居民过去都睡在帐篷里，但几年前北极熊出现了，所以帐篷被金属棚所取代。
The Greenland ice sheet has the shape of a dome, with Summit resting at the very top.
格陵兰冰盖呈圆顶形状，山顶位于最顶部。
The ice dome is so immense that it’s hard to picture, even if you’ve flown across it.
冰穹是如此巨大，即使你飞过它也很难想象。
It extends over more than six hundred and fifty thousand square miles—an area roughly the size of Alaska—and in the middle it is two miles tall.
它绵延超过六十五万平方英里——面积大约相当于阿拉斯加——中间高两英里。
It is massive enough to depress the Earth’s crust and to exert a significant gravitational pull on the oceans.
它的质量足以压低地壳并对海洋产生巨大的引力。
If all of Greenland’s ice were cut into one-inch cubes and these were piled one on top of another, the stack would reach Alpha Centauri.
如果格陵兰岛所有的冰都被切成一英寸的立方体，并将它们一层一层地堆起来，那么这一堆冰就能到达半人马座阿尔法星。
If it melted—a rather more plausible scenario—global sea levels would rise by twenty feet.
如果它融化——这是一种更合理的情况——全球海平面将上升二十英尺。
Until relatively recently, it was thought that Summit would be, if not unaffected by climate change, at least untroubled by it.
直到最近，人们还认为峰会即使不是不受气候变化的影响，至少也不会受到气候变化的困扰。
Such is the ice sheet’s bulk that at its center it creates its own weather.
冰盖的体积如此之大，以至于它的中心创造了自己的天气。
But in the past few decades Greenland has changed in ways that have stunned scientists who spend their lives studying it.
但在过去的几十年里，格陵兰岛发生的变化让毕生研究它的科学家们感到震惊。
Since the nineteen-seventies, it has shed some six trillion tons of ice, and the rate of loss has been accelerating.
自十九世纪七十年代以来，它已流失了约6万亿吨冰，而且流失速度一直在加快。
Crevasses are appearing at higher elevations, glaciers are moving at non-glacial speeds, and large parts of the ice sheet appear to be twisting, like a writhing beast.
海拔较高的地方出现裂缝，冰川以非冰川速度移动，大部分冰盖似乎在扭曲，就像一头扭动的野兽。
In July, 2012, surface melt was detected at Summit for the first time since modern measurements began.
2012 年 7 月，自现代测量开始以来，Summit 首次检测到表面熔化。
In 2019, the station experienced melt in mid-June and then again in late July.
2019年，该站在6月中旬经历了融化，然后在7月下旬再次经历了融化。
On August 14, 2021, it rained, an event so remarkable that it made news around the world.
2021 年 8 月 14 日，下雨了，这一事件引起了全世界的关注。
(“For the First Time on Record, Rain Fell at the Summit of Greenland,” ran the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald .) There was late-season melt at Summit in September, 2022, and more melt in June, 2023.
（《悉尼先驱晨报》的标题是“有记录以来格陵兰岛山顶首次下雨”。）2022 年 9 月，格陵兰岛山顶出现了季末融化，2023 年 6 月出现了更多融化。
The story of climate change is generally told in terms of human action, and for good reason.
气候变化的故事通常是从人类行为的角度来讲述的，并且有充分的理由。
The almost two trillion tons of CO 2 that people have pumped into the atmosphere have changed the planet in ways that every day become more apparent.
人们向大气中排放了近 2 万亿吨 CO 2 ，对地球的改变日益明显。
Last year, average global temperatures set a new record, and by a wide margin.
去年，全球平均气温创下了新纪录，而且大幅领先。
Canada experienced record wildfires; the Caribbean saw record ocean temperatures, which devastated its coral reefs; and Libya was hit with record rainfall, which led to a dam collapse that killed more than five thousand people.
加拿大经历了创纪录的野火；加勒比地区的海洋温度创历史新高，珊瑚礁遭到破坏；利比亚遭遇创纪录的降雨，导致大坝垮塌，造成五千多人死亡。
This year’s global temperatures will almost certainly surpass last year’s.
今年的全球气温几乎肯定会超过去年。
Among the many climate-related disasters of 2024 so far have been a heat wave in Mecca that killed thirteen hundred pilgrims during the hajj and Hurricane Helene, which caused at least twenty billion dollars’ worth of damage.
迄今为止，2024 年发生了众多与气候相关的灾难，其中包括麦加的热浪和飓风海伦，前者在朝觐期间导致 1300 名朝圣者死亡，后者造成了至少 200 亿美元的损失。
How people—or governments and corporations, run by people—respond to the mounting losses will have repercussions that will last, for all intents and purposes, forever.
人们——或者由人们管理的政府和企业——如何应对不断增加的损失，无论出于何种意图和目的，都会产生永远持续的影响。
As no less an authority than the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it, upon releasing its latest scientific assessment, “The future is in our hands.”
正如联合国政府间气候变化专门委员会等权威机构在发布其最新科学评估结果时所说，“未来掌握在我们手中。”
But, like so many stories that get told, this one doesn’t tell the whole story.
但是，就像许多讲述的故事一样，这个故事并没有讲述整个故事。
The future depends on how humanity reacts to global warming, and it also depends on how the Earth does.
未来取决于人类如何应对全球变暖，也取决于地球如何应对。
Owing to advances in everything from satellite altimetry to deep-sea drilling, a great deal has been learned in the past few decades about the planet’s history.
由于从卫星测高到深海钻探等各方面的进步，过去几十年来人们对地球的历史有了很多了解。
Much of the new science suggests that the climate is, all on its own, unstable, prone to dramatic and sometimes sudden shifts.
许多新科学表明，气候本身是不稳定的，容易发生剧烈的、有时甚至是突然的变化。
The Russell Glacier, near Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, has shrunk quickly.
格陵兰岛康克鲁斯瓦格附近的拉塞尔冰川正在迅速缩小。
The history of Greenland is a case in point.
格陵兰岛的历史就是一个很好的例子。
During what’s known as the Last Glacial Maximum, some twenty thousand years ago, an ice sheet stretched more or less continuously from Greenland across Ellesmere and Baffin Islands and down over Canada and much of the northern United States.
大约两万年前，在所谓的末次盛冰期，冰盖或多或少地从格陵兰岛连续延伸到埃尔斯米尔岛和巴芬群岛，一直延伸到加拿大和美国北部的大部分地区。
So much water was tied up in the ice that sea levels were four hundred feet lower than they are today, and it was possible to walk not just from Siberia to Alaska but also from Australia to Tasmania and from England to France.
如此多的水被困在冰中，导致海平面比现在低四百英尺，不仅可以从西伯利亚步行到阿拉斯加，还可以从澳大利亚步行到塔斯马尼亚，从英国步行到法国。
When the ice began to recede, around fifteen thousand years ago, large swaths of the world experienced catastrophic flooding.
大约一万五千年前，当冰层开始消退时，世界大片地区经历了灾难性的洪水。
During one particularly sodden period, known as meltwater pulse 1A, sea levels rose by more than a foot a decade.
在一个被称为融水脉冲 1A 的特别潮湿的时期，海平面每十年上升一英尺多。
Most scientists believe that ice ages—there have been at least ten of them over the past two and half million years—are initiated and terminated by periodic shifts in the Earth’s orbit, caused by, among other factors, the tug of Jupiter and Saturn.
大多数科学家认为，冰河时代——在过去的二百五十万年里至少发生过十次冰河时代——是由地球轨道的周期性变化引发和终止的，而这种变化是由木星和土星的牵引力等因素造成的。
But orbital shifts produce only slight changes in the amount of sunlight that reaches different parts of the globe at different times of the year.
但轨道变化只会导致一年中不同时间到达地球不同地区的阳光量发生轻微变化。
Such slight variations are insufficient to explain the growth and subsequent retreat of massive ice sheets.
这种微小的变化不足以解释大块冰盖的增长和随后的消退。
Rather, it seems, the orbital shifts act like a trigger, setting off other processes—feedbacks—that greatly amplify their effect.
相反，轨道变化似乎就像一个触发器，引发其他过程（反馈），从而大大放大其效果。
One relatively straightforward feedback features albedo, from the Latin word for “whiteness.” Ice and especially snow have a high albedo.
一种相对简单的反馈是反照率（albedo），来自拉丁语，意为“白色”。冰，尤其是雪，具有很高的反照率。
They reflect lots of sunlight back to space.
它们将大量阳光反射回太空。
Thus, as an ice sheet grows, the planet absorbs less energy.
因此，随着冰盖的增长，地球吸收的能量就会减少。
This has a cooling effect, which encourages the buildup of more snow and ice, which results in more reflectivity, and so on.
这具有冷却效果，促进更多雪和冰的积聚，从而导致更多的反射率，等等。
Start to melt an ice sheet and the same cycle spins in reverse.
冰盖开始融化，同样的循环反向旋转。
Today, feedbacks are, to put it mildly, a growing concern.
如今，温和地说，反馈越来越令人担忧。
A report published last year by more than two hundred researchers from around the world noted that many of the systems that determine the climate exhibit nonlinear behavior.
去年，来自世界各地的两百多名研究人员发表的一份报告指出，许多决定气候的系统都表现出非线性行为。
Such systems may “shift to a very different state, often abruptly or irreversibly, as a result of self-sustaining feedbacks.” The researchers identified two dozen potential “tipping systems,” among them the Greenland ice sheet.
这样的系统可能“由于自我维持的反馈而通常突然或不可逆转地转变为一种非常不同的状态。”研究人员发现了两打潜在的“倾覆系统”，其中包括格陵兰冰盖。
At a certain point, the report warned, feedbacks could become so powerful that, even if CO 2 emissions were cut dramatically and temperatures stabilized, the ice sheet would continue to shrink, possibly until it collapsed.
报告警告说，在某个时刻，反馈可能会变得如此强大，以至于即使CO 2 排放量大幅减少且温度稳定，冰盖仍将继续缩小，甚至可能直至崩塌。
The “best estimate” of when this critical threshold will be reached is when average global temperatures rise 1.5 degrees Celsius—roughly three degrees Fahrenheit—above preindustrial levels.
对何时达到这一临界阈值的“最佳估计”是全球平均气温比工业化前水平上升 1.5 摄氏度（约 3 华氏度）时。
Even after that line is crossed, it will take many centuries for the changes set in motion to play out.
即使在跨越这条线之后，所引发的变化也需要几个世纪的时间才能发挥作用。
Still, as a practical matter, there will be no going back.
但实际上，我们不会再回头了。
When it comes to tipping systems, the future is in our hands until it isn’t.
当谈到自卸系统时，未来就掌握在我们手中，直到它失控为止。
Days at Summit begin with a staff meeting held in a heated tent that’s outfitted with a treadmill, weights, and yoga mats.
Summit 的日子从在配备跑步机、哑铃和瑜伽垫的暖气帐篷中举行的员工会议开始。
In front of the treadmill, people have taped scenes from more temperate climes—ones with trees and flowers.
在跑步机前，人们录制了来自较温和气候的场景——有树木和鲜花的场景。
On my first morning at the station—I still had a headache, but no fatal brain swelling—the station’s supervisor opened the session with a request for volunteers to lug a pair of propane tanks up the stairs to the Big House.
在我到达车站的第一个早上——我仍然头痛，但没有致命的脑肿胀——车站的主管在会议开始时要求志愿者将一对丙烷罐拖上楼梯到大房子。
Summit’s cook announced that the latest shipment of food was short on lettuce.
峰会的厨师宣布，最新一批食品生菜短缺。
Someone pointed out that there were problems with the flags on the station’s runway, which is made entirely of snow.
有人指出，车站跑道上的旗帜有问题，跑道完全是由雪制成的。
A fourth person promised to clean the outhouses.
第四个人答应打扫外屋。
After the meeting, I got to launch the daily weather balloon, which was about three feet tall and dangled a cartridge of electronic instruments.
会议结束后，我开始发射每日气象气球，它大约三英尺高，悬挂着一个电子仪器盒。
The balloon, filled with helium, flew out of my hands.
充满氦气的气球从我手中飞走了。
I tried to follow it as it sailed over the ice, but I soon lost sight of it.
当它在冰面上航行时，我试图追踪它，但很快我就看不见它了。
The view from Summit in all directions is pretty much the same: white.
从山顶看去，各个方向的景色几乎都是一样的：白色。
The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who, in the eighteen-eighties, led the first team to cross Greenland on skis, recalled the ice sheet’s monotony—an “interminable flat desert of snow.” There was, he complained, “no break or change in our horizon, no object to rest the eye upon, and no point by which to direct the course.” Especially when it’s cloudy, the ice, free of shadows, appears as one enormous blank page.
挪威探险家弗里乔夫·南森 (Fridtjof Nansen) 在 18 世纪 80 年代带领第一支队伍滑雪穿越格陵兰岛，他回忆起冰原的单调——“一片无边无际的平坦雪漠”。他抱怨道，“我们的地平线没有中断或变化，没有可以注视的物体，也没有可以指引方向的点。”尤其是在阴天的时候，没有阴影的冰就像一张巨大的空白页。
In fact, the ice sheet is packed with information, like a giant encyclopedia.
事实上，冰盖上充满了信息，就像一本巨大的百科全书。
Among the first to recognize this was Ernst Sorge, a German glaciologist.
德国冰川学家恩斯特·佐尔格（Ernst Sorge）是最早认识到这一点的人之一。
“I’m looking at a landscape whose vast simplicity is nowhere to be surpassed on earth, and which yet conceals a thousand secrets,” he wrote.
“我看到的风景，其巨大的简单性在地球上是无与伦比的，但它却隐藏着一千个秘密，”他写道。
Sorge was part of a famous—infamous, really—expedition that set off from Copenhagen in the spring of 1930.
佐尔格是 1930 年春天从哥本哈根出发的著名探险队的一员。
The expedition’s leader was another German scientist, Alfred Wegener, who’s best known for having come up with the theory of continental drift.
这次探险队的领队是另一位德国科学家阿尔弗雷德·韦格纳，他因提出大陆漂移理论而闻名。
One of Wegener’s goals was to establish a camp at a site dubbed Eismitte, or “ice middle,” about a hundred miles south of where Summit now sits.
韦格纳的目标之一是在一个被称为 Eismitte（或“冰中”）的地点建立一个营地，该地点位于峰会现在所在地以南约一百英里处。
Sorge and a colleague were supposed to overwinter at the site and take meteorological measurements.
佐尔格和一名同事本应在现场过冬并进行气象测量。
Owing to a series of unfortunate events, a third man, who was suffering from frostbite, ended up stuck at the camp as well and had to have his toes amputated with a penknife.
由于一系列不幸事件，第三名患有冻伤的男子也被困在营地里，不得不用小刀截掉脚趾。
Meanwhile, Wegener died as he was trying to fight his way back to the coast, eating his sled dogs along the way.
与此同时，韦格纳在试图返回海岸时死亡，沿途吃掉了他的雪橇犬。
His body is still buried somewhere in the ice.
他的尸体仍然埋在冰里的某个地方。
From the surface, the camp at Eismitte looked like a snow fort with a round turret.
从表面上看，艾斯米特营地就像一座带有圆形炮塔的雪堡。
Beneath the surface were chambers—a living room, an instrument room, and a storeroom—that had been dug out of the snow.
地表之下是从雪中挖出来的房间——一间起居室、一间仪器室和一间储藏室。
Fascinated by the subglacial world, Sorge kept on digging until, at the far end of the camp, he had sunk a shaft more than fifty feet deep.
佐尔格对冰下世界着迷，继续挖掘，直到在营地的远端挖出了一个五十多英尺深的竖井。
Studying the walls of the shaft by lamplight, he discovered that he could tell the difference between snow that had fallen on Eismitte in the summer and snow that had fallen in the winter.
通过灯光研究竖井的墙壁，他发现他可以区分艾斯米特夏季和冬季的雪。
By counting backward through the seasonal layers, he calculated that his shaft extended through twenty-one years’ worth of accumulation.
通过按季节分层倒数，他计算出他的轴延伸了二十一年的积累。
In the decades that followed, researchers delved deeper and deeper, using increasingly sophisticated drills.
在接下来的几十年里，研究人员使用越来越复杂的钻头进行了越来越深入的研究。
The farther the drills descended, the denser the layers of old snow became, until they were compressed into ice.
钻头下降得越远，旧雪层就越密，直到被压缩成冰。
But even in the icy depths the difference between summer and winter precipitation could be discerned.
但即使在冰冷的深处，夏季和冬季降水之间的差异也能被辨别出来。
This made it possible to date each layer back through the centuries.
这使得每一层的年代可以追溯到几个世纪前。
Meanwhile, scientists found that they could tease out a wealth of data from every annual increment.
与此同时，科学家发现他们可以从每年的增量中梳理出大量数据。
By analyzing the ice with a mass spectrometer, they could calculate what the average temperature on Greenland had been in any given year.
通过用质谱仪分析冰，他们可以计算出格陵兰岛任何一年的平均气温。
And by extracting the gases contained in tiny bubbles of trapped air they could reconstruct changes in the atmosphere.
通过提取被困空气中的微小气泡中所含的气体，他们可以重建大气的变化。
In the nineteen-nineties, a team of American researchers working at Summit succeeded in drilling all the way from the top of the ice sheet to the bedrock.
十九世纪九十年代，在峰会工作的一组美国研究人员成功地从冰盖顶部一直钻到基岩。
In the process, they pulled up thousands of long, skinny cylinders of ice—two miles’ worth.
在这个过程中，他们拉出了数千个又长又薄的冰柱——价值两英里。
In ice from fifteen hundred and two feet down, there was snow that fell when Nero was emperor; at twenty-three hundred and fifty feet, snow from the reign of Tutankhamun.
尼禄当皇帝时，从一千五百零二英尺以下的冰层中降下了雪。海拔两千三百五十英尺，是图坦卡蒙统治时期的积雪。
At the very bottom was snow that fell before the start of the last glaciation.
最底部是末次冰期开始前落下的雪。
Meltwater streaming from the Russell Glacier eventually makes its way into the North Atlantic.
从拉塞尔冰川流出的融水最终流入北大西洋。
Analysis of the core showed, in extraordinary detail, how temperatures in central Greenland had varied during the last ice age, which in the U.S. is called the Wisconsin.
对核心的分析非常详细地显示了格陵兰岛中部在最后一个冰河时代（在美国被称为威斯康星州）的温度变化。
As would be expected, there was a steep drop in temperatures at the start of the Wisconsin, around a hundred thousand years ago, and a steep rise toward the end of it.
正如所预料的那样，大约十万年前，威斯康星河的起始处气温急剧下降，而到末期则急剧上升。
But the analysis also revealed something disconcerting.
但分析也揭示了一些令人不安的事情。
In addition to the long-term oscillations, the ice recorded dozens of shorter, wilder swings.
除了长期的波动之外，冰层还记录了数十次较短、更剧烈的波动。
During the Wisconsin, Greenland was often unimaginably cold, with temperatures nearly thirty degrees lower than they are now.
在威斯康星州期间，格陵兰岛经常寒冷得难以想象，气温比现在低了近三十度。
Then temperatures would shoot up, in some instances by as much as twenty degrees in a couple of decades, only to drop again, somewhat more gradually.
然后气温会急剧上升，在某些情况下会在几十年内上升二十度，然后又会再次下降，但速度会更加缓慢。
Finally, about twelve thousand years ago, the roller coaster came to a halt.
大约一万二千年前，过山车终于停了下来。
Temperatures settled down, and a time of relative climate tranquillity began.
气温逐渐稳定下来，气候相对平静的时期开始了。
This is the period that includes all of recorded history, a coincidence that, presumably, is no coincidence.
这个时期包含了所有有记录的历史，这是一个巧合，但想必并非巧合。
Richard Alley, a glaciologist at Penn State and the author of a book about the ice-coring project, summed up the findings as follows: “For most of the last 100,000 years, a crazily jumping climate has been the rule, not the exception.”
宾夕法尼亚州立大学的冰川学家理查德·艾利（Richard Alley）是一本有关冰芯项目的书的作者，他对研究结果进行了如下总结：“在过去 10 万年的大部分时间里，气候的疯狂跳跃一直是常态，而不是例外。”
To work at Summit, scientists have to apply to the N.S.F., an independent agency of the U.S. government.
要在 Summit 工作，科学家必须向美国政府的独立机构 N.S.F. 提出申请。
The same goes for journalists.
对于记者来说也是如此。
My trip to the station was arranged by the agency’s Polar Media Program, which sent an “escort”—a Washington, D.C.-based press officer—to accompany me.
我前往空间站的行程是由该机构的极地媒体项目安排的，该项目派出了一位“护送者”——一位驻华盛顿特区的新闻官员——陪同我。
So intent was my escort on not letting me out of her sight that it became something of a station joke.
我的护送人员如此刻意不让我离开她的视线，以至于这成了车站的一个笑话。
At one point, when we briefly became separated, I asked someone in the Big House to let her know that I had gone to another building.
有一次，当我们短暂分开时，我请大房子里的人告诉她我去了另一栋楼。
“Don’t worry,” he replied.
“别担心，”他回答道。
“I’ll tell her you wandered off into the snow.”
“我会告诉她你走入雪地了。”
At the time of my stay, in mid-July, roughly half of the station’s forty-odd residents were contract employees who were there to keep the place running, an immense logistical challenge.
七月中旬，我入住期间，车站的四十多名居民中大约有一半是合同工，他们的职责是维持车站的运转，这对后勤来说是一个巨大的挑战。
Summit’s (more or less) constant below-freezing temperatures make basic operations like supplying drinking water both complicated and energy-intensive: the water has to be melted from snow, the pipes that circulate it have to be heated, and the fuel that provides the energy has to be flown in.
峰会的（或多或少）恒定低于冰点的温度使得供应饮用水等基本操作变得复杂且能源密集：水必须从雪中融化，循环水的管道必须被加热，提供能量的燃料必须空运进来。
(Thanks to a long-standing arrangement, supplies and also people are transported to Summit by the New York Air National Guard’s 109th Airlift Wing, which operates a fleet of ski-equipped cargo planes out of an old U.S. Air Force base on Greenland’s west coast.) Several people I met at Summit had spent the previous winter working on Antarctica, either at McMurdo or South Pole Station, and were planning to return there for the next austral summer.
（由于长期的安排，物资和人员由纽约空军国民警卫队第 109 空运联队运送到峰会，该联队在格陵兰岛西海岸的一个旧美国空军基地运营着一支配备滑雪装备的货机。）我在峰会上遇到的几个人去年冬天在麦克默多或南极站工作过，并计划在下一个南方夏天返回那里。
They said that the challenge of the work was part of its draw, as was the space-station-like camaraderie.
他们表示，这项工作的挑战是其吸引力的一部分，空间站般的友情也是如此。
Another largish contingent was installing a network of radio antennas.
另一个规模较大的队伍正在安装无线电天线网络。
These, it was hoped, could be used to detect ultra-high-energy neutrinos.
人们希望这些可以用来探测超高能中微子。
Potential sources of such neutrinos, I learned, include gamma-ray bursts, pulsars, and clusters of galaxies known as flat-spectrum radio quasars.
据我所知，此类中微子的潜在来源包括伽马射线暴、脉冲星和被称为平谱射电类星体的星系团。
“We cannot detect the neutrinos directly,” Felix Schlüter, a German astrophysicist, explained to me one day, when I sat down with him in the Big House.
“我们无法直接探测到中微子，”德国天体物理学家菲利克斯·施吕特有一天，当我和他在大房子里坐下来时，他向我解释道。
“We can only detect them when they’re interacting with the ice and producing other particles.” The following afternoon, I (and my escort) set out with Schlüter on snowmobiles to visit some antennas that had recently been installed about three miles from the station.
“只有当它们与冰相互作用并产生其他粒子时，我们才能检测到它们。”第二天下午，我（和我的陪同人员）与施吕特一起骑着雪地摩托出发去参观一些最近安装在距离空间站约三英里的天线。
During the ride, I pulled my neck gaiter over my mouth, which turned out to be a mistake: the moisture from my breath caused it to freeze to my face.
在骑行过程中，我把颈套拉到嘴上，结果证明这是一个错误：呼吸中的水分导致它冻结在我的脸上。
When we got to the spot, it was maybe ten degrees Fahrenheit, and a brisk wind was blowing.
当我们到达现场时，气温大约是十华氏度，刮着凛冽的风。
There was some scaffolding and green flags, but most of the critical equipment had been buried hundreds of feet down.
有一些脚手架和绿色旗帜，但大多数关键设备都埋在数百英尺深的地方。
We were deep enough into Nansen’s interminable desert that the Big House, the Tomato, and the outhouses had all sunk out of view.
我们已经深入南森无边无际的沙漠，大房子、番茄屋和外屋都消失在视野之外了。
Every summer, the N.S.F.
每年夏天，N.S.F.
flies a group of high-school students up to Summit as part of a program whose stated goal is to “inspire the next generation” of polar researchers.
载着一群高中生登上峰会，这是一项计划的一部分，该计划的既定目标是“激励下一代”极地研究人员。
Zoe Courville, a snow scientist with the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, in New Hampshire, was at the station to prepare for the annual visit.
新罕布什尔州寒冷地区研究与工程实验室的雪科学家佐伊·库维尔 (Zoe Courville) 正在空间站为年度访问做准备。
One morning, I watched her and an energetic young technician named Caleigh Warner dig a snow pit behind the Big House.
一天早上，我看到她和一位名叫卡利·华纳（Caleigh Warner）的精力充沛的年轻技术员在大房子后面挖了一个雪坑。
The idea was to use it, à la Sorge, to show the kids the difference between summer and winter snow.
我们的想法是像佐尔格那样用它来向孩子们展示夏季和冬季雪的区别。
When Courville and Warner were done, the pit was about seven feet deep and accessible only by a set of snow stairs.
当考维尔和华纳完成后，坑约七英尺深，只能通过一组雪梯进入。
I clambered down.
我爬了下来。
For the first few layers, the seasonal differences were clear even to a novice like me.
对于前几层，即使对于像我这样的新手来说，季节差异也很明显。
Summer snow is coarse and grainy; winter snow, smooth and dense.
夏季的雪质地粗糙，呈颗粒状；冬天的雪，光滑而浓密。
Courville ran a bare finger down one wall of the pit.
库维尔用一根裸露的手指沿着坑的一堵墙往下划。
A couple of feet below the surface, she paused.
在水面下几英尺处，她停了下来。
“That’s probably last summer’s melt,” she said.
“这可能是去年夏天的融化，”她说。
“When you look at the grains, they’re rounded and fused together.” I ran a gloved finger along the same spot.
“当你观察这些颗粒时，它们是圆形的并且融合在一起。”我用戴着手套的手指抚摸同一个地方。
The melt layer was thin and brittle.
熔体层薄且脆。
I broke off a piece that resembled a shard of glass.
我折断了一块类似玻璃碎片的碎片。
“When I first started coming up here, twenty years ago, we had models that were predicting what the climate would be like in Greenland,” Courville said.
“二十年前，当我第一次来到这里时，我们有模型可以预测格陵兰岛的气候，”考维尔说。
“And we’re starting to be outside of even the most dire predictions in terms of temperature increase.”
“就气温上升而言，我们甚至开始超出最可怕的预测。”
“I try to be optimistic about things,” Courville told me at another point.
“我试着对事情保持乐观，”库维尔在另一次告诉我。
“I don’t know that it’s all doom and gloom.
“我不知道这一切都是厄运和阴郁。
But from what I’ve experienced here in Greenland, at the center of the ice sheet, we’re approaching the point of no return.”
但从我在格陵兰岛冰盖中心的经历来看，我们正在接近不归路。”
When the students finally arrived—they were a day late, owing to various problems with the ski-equipped planes—they were buzzing with excitement.
当学生们终于到达时——由于配备滑雪设备的飞机出现各种问题，他们迟到了一天——他们兴奋不已。
They took turns descending into the pit in heavy boots and parkas that they had borrowed for the trip.
他们穿着为这次旅行借来的厚重靴子和派克大衣，轮流下到坑里。
A visiting scientist from the University of California, Irvine, brought out some cylinders of ancient ice to show them.
一位来自加州大学欧文分校的访问科学家拿出了一些古代冰柱向它们展示。
The kids were invited to smash the cylinders with a mallet, an activity they took to with gusto.
孩子们被邀请用木槌敲碎圆柱体，他们对这项活动充满热情。
Ziplock bags were passed around so that everyone could take a chunk as a keepsake.
自封袋被四处传递，以便每个人都可以拿一大块作为纪念品。
The gesture struck me as curious, since the ice was destined to melt as soon as the students took off again for the coast.
这个举动让我感到好奇，因为一旦学生们再次出发前往海岸，冰注定会融化。
But maybe, I thought, that was the point.
但我想，也许这就是重点。
Today, the spot where the Summit core was drilled is preserved almost like a shrine.
如今，山顶核心钻探地点几乎像一座神殿一样被保存下来。
The metal casing that the drillers left behind still sticks up out of the snow, even though the borehole beneath it has collapsed.
钻探人员留下的金属套管仍然从雪中伸出，尽管其下方的钻孔已经塌陷。
The casing is wrapped in a custom-made jacket, and attached to it is a red flag that shudders in the near-constant wind.
外壳包裹在定制的夹克中，上面附有一面红旗，在近乎持续的风中颤抖。
The Summit core—officially the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two, or GISP 2, core—filled in a key chapter in climate history and, at the same time, opened up a huge gap.
峰会核心——正式的格陵兰冰盖项目二号（GISP 2）核心——填补了气候历史的关键篇章，同时也开辟了一个巨大的空白。
Apparently, there was some great force missing from the textbooks—one that was capable of yanking temperatures around like a yo-yo.
显然，教科书上缺少某种强大的力量——一种能够像溜溜球一样拉动温度的力量。
By now, evidence of the crazy swings seen in the Greenland ice has shown up in many other parts of the world—in a lake bed in the Balkans, for example, and in a cave in southern New Mexico.
到目前为止，格陵兰冰层疯狂波动的证据已经出现在世界许多其他地方，例如巴尔干半岛的湖床和新墨西哥州南部的一个洞穴。
(In more temperate regions, the magnitude of the swings was lower.)
（在温带地区，波动幅度较小。）
Scientists are still struggling to make sense of the data.
科学家们仍在努力理解这些数据。
The best theory is that the wild swings were set off by some daisy chain of feedbacks involving the ice, the air, and—most important—the oceans.
最好的理论是，剧烈的波动是由一些涉及冰、空气，以及最重要的海洋的反馈链引发的。
The great wheelworks of the climate, the oceans transport fantastic amounts of energy—a quadrillion watts’ worth—from the sun-drenched tropics toward the sun-starved poles.
作为气候的巨大轮子，海洋将大量的能量（价值四万亿瓦）从阳光普照的热带地区输送到缺乏阳光的两极。
One particularly important loop in this system is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC (pronounced “ay-mock”).
该系统中一个特别重要的环路是大西洋经向翻转环流（AMOC）（发音为“ay-mock”）。
The loop might be said to begin in the North Atlantic, where the surface waters are especially cold and salty.
这条环路可以说是从北大西洋开始的，那里的地表水特别冷而且含盐量高。
The combination of low temperature and high salinity makes the water unusually dense, so it sinks.
低温和高盐度的结合使水异常稠密，因此会下沉。
Warmer water from the south rushes in behind it; as this water cools, it sinks, drawing still more water north, and so on.
温暖的海水从南方涌来；当这些水冷却时，它会下沉，将更多的水吸向北方，依此类推。
Oceanographers measure currents in units called sverdrups.
海洋学家以称为斯维尔德鲁普（sverdrups）的单位测量海流。
One sverdrup equals a million cubic metres per second.
一斯沃德鲁普等于每秒一百万立方米。
When the AMOC is operating at full strength, the water circulates to the tune of twenty sverdrups, a hundred times the flow of the Amazon River.
当 AMOC 全力运行时，水循环量为 20 sverdrup，是亚马逊河流量的一百倍。
Icebergs near Ilulissat, Greenland, break off from the Jakobshavn Glacier.
格陵兰岛伊卢利萨特附近的冰山从雅各布港冰川上脱落。
Any disruption of the AMOC would disrupt the great oceanic transfer of energy and, with that, the climate.
AMOC 的任何破坏都会扰乱巨大的海洋能源转移，进而扰乱气候。
The consensus among scientists is that such disruptions must have occurred repeatedly during the last glaciation, even if exactly what triggered them remains unclear.
科学家们一致认为，这种破坏在上一次冰河期一定会反复发生，尽管究竟是什么引发了这些破坏尚不清楚。
In the context of global warming, the AMOC ’s vulnerability is—once again, to put things mildly—worrisome.
在全球变暖的背景下，温和地说，AMOC 的脆弱性再次令人担忧。
The fact that there haven’t been any major disruptions for the past twelve thousand years could mean that the system is stable during warm periods.
事实上，过去一万二千年没有发生任何重大破坏，这可能意味着该系统在温暖时期是稳定的。
Alternatively, it could mean that it’s stable until it receives some ill-understood nudge.
或者，这可能意味着它是稳定的，直到受到一些不理解的推动。
“We play Russian roulette with climate,” Wallace Broecker, a geologist at Columbia University who popularized the term “global warming” and did critical work on ocean circulation, once observed.
“我们用气候来玩俄罗斯轮盘赌，”哥伦比亚大学地质学家华莱士·布勒克(Wallace Broecker)普及了“全球变暖”一词，并在观察到海洋环流后做了重要工作。
But “no one knows what lies in the active chamber of the gun.”
但“没有人知道枪的活动室里藏着什么。”
As Greenland melts, more freshwater is streaming into the oceans.
随着格陵兰岛融化，更多的淡水流入海洋。
Discharge from Arctic rivers, like the Lena, in Russia, is also rising.
俄罗斯勒拿河等北极河流的排放量也在增加。
All this is changing the density of the North Atlantic, potentially enough to interfere with the AMOC ’s conveyor-belt-like motion.
所有这些都在改变北大西洋的密度，有可能足以干扰 AMOC 的传送带式运动。
Researchers have been directly monitoring the system’s rate of flow for only about twenty years—too short a time to draw firm conclusions.
研究人员直接监测系统流速的时间只有大约二十年——时间太短，无法得出确切的结论。
But scientists who have tried to reconstruct circulation patterns over longer periods, by looking at indirect evidence, have concluded that the AMOC is slowing.
但科学家们试图通过间接证据来重建较长时期内的环流模式，他们得出的结论是，AMOC 正在放缓。
A 2021 study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change , found several “early warning signals” that the system was “close to a critical transition.” A 2023 study, in Nature Communications , went a step further: it predicted that the AMOC could tip into a new state within decades.
2021 年发表在《自然气候变化》杂志上的一项研究发现了几个“预警信号”，表明该系统“接近关键转变”。 《自然通讯》2023 年的一项研究更进一步：它预测 AMOC 可能会在几十年内进入新状态。
Just before I left for Greenland, yet another study on the AMOC appeared; this one estimated that it could shut down completely sometime between 2037 and 2064.
就在我动身前往格陵兰岛之前，又出现了另一项关于 AMOC 的研究；据估计，它可能会在 2037 年至 2064 年之间的某个时候完全关闭。
Were the AMOC to collapse, heat would build in the Southern Hemisphere.
如果 AMOC 崩溃，南半球的热量将会增加。
Global rainfall patterns would shift, storms in the Atlantic would become more destructive, and warm water would pile up on the shores of the eastern U.S., leading to rapid sea-level rise.
全球降雨模式将发生变化，大西洋的风暴将变得更具破坏性，温暖的海水将在美国东部海岸堆积，导致海平面迅速上升。
Places like Britain and Scandinavia would, perversely, grow much colder; according to one recent study, temperatures in London would drop by almost twenty degrees, which would give it a climate like present-day Siberia’s.
相反，像英国和斯堪的纳维亚半岛这样的地方会变得更加寒冷。根据最近的一项研究，伦敦的气温将下降近二十度，这将使其气候类似于今天的西伯利亚。
Farming in much of northern Europe would become impossible.
北欧大部分地区的农业将变得不可能。
“A full AMOC collapse would be a massive, planetary-scale disaster” is how Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at the University of Potsdam, in Germany, recently put it.
德国波茨坦大学海洋学家斯特凡·拉姆斯托夫 (Stefan Rahmstorf) 最近表示，“AMOC 的全面崩溃将是一场大规模的全球灾难”。
“We really want to prevent this from happening.”
“我们真的想阻止这种情况发生。”
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a Danish territory.
格陵兰岛是世界上最大的岛屿，是丹麦的领土。
Though eighty per cent of the island is covered in ice, there are slender ice-free strips along the coast, and people have inhabited these areas, on and off, for nearly five thousand years.
尽管岛上百分之八十的面积被冰覆盖，但沿海地区仍存在细长的无冰带，人们断断续续地在这些地区居住了近五千年。
Today, most Greenlanders are of Inuit descent and speak both Danish and Greenlandic.
如今，大多数格陵兰人都是因纽特人后裔，讲丹麦语和格陵兰语。
About a third of the island’s fifty-six thousand residents live in the capital, Nuuk; the rest live in towns and villages that hug the fjords.
岛上五万六千名居民中，约有三分之一居住在首府努克。其余的人居住在毗邻峡湾的城镇和村庄。
Kangerlussuaq, which has a population of about five hundred, sits at the end of a particularly long fjord on Greenland’s west coast.
康克鲁斯瓦克 (Kangerlussuaq) 人口约 500 人，坐落在格陵兰岛西海岸一个特别长的峡湾的尽头。
The town exists largely because of its runway, which was built by the U.S. Air Force during the Second World War and is now used by Air Greenland as well as by the New York Air National Guard.
该镇的存在很大程度上是因为它的跑道，该跑道是美国空军在第二次世界大战期间建造的，现在由格陵兰航空和纽约航空国民警卫队使用。
It has a grocery store, a restaurant overlooking the runway, and a recreation center open only to Guard members and their invited guests.
它设有一家杂货店、一家俯瞰跑道的餐厅以及一个仅向警卫队成员及其受邀客人开放的娱乐中心。
After my stay at Summit, Kangerlussuaq struck me as positively cosmopolitan.
入住 Summit 后，康克鲁斯瓦克给我的印象是一个非常国际化的城市。
In Kanger, as it is often called, I had arranged to meet Marco Tedesco, a climate scientist at Columbia who studies ice dynamics.
在人们常说的康尔，我安排会见了马可·特德斯科 (Marco Tedesco)，他是哥伦比亚大学研究冰动力学的气候科学家。
When I caught up with him, he was fuming over a rental car.
当我追上他时，他正在为一辆租来的汽车而生气。
He’d been under the impression that he’d reserved an S.U.V.
他一直以为自己预订了一辆SUV。
with off-road clearance; instead, he’d been handed the keys to an ancient Honda.
具有越野间隙；相反，他收到了一辆老式本田汽车的钥匙。
Would the car get stuck in glacial silt, which sometimes acts like quicksand?
汽车会陷入有时像流沙一样的冰川淤泥中吗？
From Tedesco, I learned a new word in Greenlandic: immaqa , meaning “maybe.”
从特德斯科那里，我学到了一个格陵兰语新词：immaqa，意思是“也许”。
Tedesco, who grew up near Naples, is tall and lanky, with a shaved head and a collection of tattoos that he has acquired in various places for various reasons.
特德斯科在那不勒斯附近长大，身材瘦高，剃着光头，身上有一系列纹身，这些纹身是他出于各种原因在不同地方纹的。
On his right arm is a shower of snowflakes; one is twelve-pointed, which, he told me, is a design very rarely found in nature and which he chose in memory of his mother.
他的右臂上沾满了雪花；其中一个是十二角的，他告诉我，这是自然界中很少见的设计，他为了纪念他的母亲而选择了它。
On his left arm, the assortment includes a water droplet that he got in Hawaii during a low period—“I felt like a drop in the ocean”—and on his chest are Chinese characters that he translated as “big truth.” Tedesco had brought along a former graduate student of his, Paolo Colosio, who’s now a postdoc at the University of Brescia.
在他的左臂上，有一个他在夏威夷低落时期得到的水滴——“我感觉就像沧海一粟”——胸前有一个汉字，他翻译为“大实话”。特德斯科带来了他以前的研究生保罗·科洛西奥（Paolo Colosio），他现在是布雷西亚大学的博士后。
When I told them that my husband taught Dante, they both began reciting the opening canto of the Inferno: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta via era smarrita.
当我告诉他们我丈夫教但丁时，他们俩开始背诵《地狱篇》的开篇：Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura / ché la diritta viaera smarta。
We went to have dinner at the restaurant by the runway.
我们去跑道边的餐厅吃晚饭。
The weather along the coast had been bad, and the place was crowded with people whose flights had been cancelled.
沿海地区天气不好，这里挤满了航班被取消的人。
(I later heard that Air Greenland is sometimes referred to as Immaqa Airline.)
（我后来听说格陵兰航空有时被称为 Immaqa Airline。）
Tedesco told me that he had become interested in the Greenland ice sheet about twenty years ago.
特德斯科告诉我，他大约二十年前就对格陵兰冰盖产生了兴趣。
At the time, he was working for NASA , thinking about how to improve the detection of snowmelt via satellite.
当时，他在美国宇航局工作，思考如何改进卫星对融雪的探测。
After a while, he decided that he needed to see the place for himself.
过了一会儿，他决定亲自去看看这个地方。
“I wanted to look at things more completely,” he said.
“我想更全面地看待事物，”他说。
Since 2010, he has visited Greenland fourteen times.
自2010年以来，他已十四次访问格陵兰岛。
On one visit, he launched a radio-controlled boat into a meltwater lake and, from a safe distance, watched the lake drain.
有一次，他将一艘无线电遥控船放入融水湖中，并在安全距离内观察湖水的流失。
On another, he installed sensors on the bottom of an empty meltwater lake and, from a not so safe distance, waited for it to fill.
另一次，他在一个空的融水湖的底部安装了传感器，并在不太安全的距离处等待它被填满。
On a trip last year, Tedesco brought along a drone to measure albedo at the edge of the ice sheet.
在去年的一次旅行中，特德斯科带了一架无人机来测量冰盖边缘的反照率。
Melt along the edge is exposing more rock and soil; since these are darker than ice, they absorb more sunlight, fostering more melt.
边缘的融化暴露出更多的岩石和土壤；由于它们比冰颜色更深，因此它们会吸收更多的阳光，从而促进更多的融化。
But even where plenty of ice remains the reflectivity of the surface is dropping.
但即使在仍有大量冰的地方，表面的反射率也在下降。
“The surface is darkening from an energy point of view,” Tedesco said.
“从能量的角度来看，表面正在变暗，”特德斯科说。
“It’s basically like exposing a wound and then putting some salt in it.”
“这基本上就像暴露伤口，然后在里面撒一些盐。”
Beyond its runway, Kangerlussuaq has one main attraction: a twenty-mile dirt road that leads away from the coast, toward the ice sheet.
除了跑道之外，康克鲁斯瓦克机场还有一个主要景点：一条二十英里长的土路，远离海岸，通向冰原。
The road, improbably enough, was laid for Volkswagen, in the late nineties.
令人难以置信的是，这条路是在九十年代末为大众汽车铺设的。
As the story goes, the carmaker had a cold-weather test facility erected on the ice which included a track and a dorm for workers.
据说，这家汽车制造商在冰上建立了一个寒冷天气测试设施，其中包括一条跑道和一间工人宿舍。
But, after a few years, the whole scheme was abandoned.
但几年后，整个计划被放弃了。
The road is now maintained by the municipality of Qeqqata, which encompasses Kangerlussuaq and is the size of Ohio.
这条道路现在由凯卡塔市政府维护，该市涵盖康克鲁斯瓦克，面积相当于俄亥俄州。
“I’m always very emotional when I drive this road,” Tedesco said the next morning, as we headed out.
“当我开车走这条路时，我总是非常情绪化，”第二天早上我们出发时特德斯科说道。
“It’s my adopted land.” As he drove, he described to me a scheme of his own—never realized—to establish a museum of Arctic smells.
“这是我的第二故乡。”当他开车时，他向我描述了他自己的一个计划——从未实现——建立一个北极气味博物馆。
Archived fragrances might include the herbal scent of the tundra and the perfectly blank smell of the ice.
存档的香水可能包括苔原的草本气味和冰的完美空白气味。
It was Colosio’s first visit to Greenland, and Tedesco warned him that the place had a mystical draw.
这是科洛西奥第一次访问格陵兰岛，特德斯科警告他，这个地方有一个神秘的吸引力。
“You’re going to want to keep coming back,” he said.
“你会想继续回来，”他说。
“You’re going to be under the spell.”
“你会中了咒语的。”
The old VW road runs almost due east, through a flat, sandy valley flanked by glacially smoothed hills.
旧的大众公路几乎沿着正东延伸，穿过平坦的沙质山谷，两侧是冰川平滑的山丘。
The area’s native trees are all low and shrubby, but a few miles out of Kanger we came to a grove of introduced pines.
该地区的原生树木都很低矮，灌木丛生，但在距康尔几英里的地方，我们来到了一片引进的松树林。
The pines seemed to be thriving in the warming climate, and people had decorated some of them with Christmas ornaments.
气候变暖，松树似乎茁壮成长，人们用圣诞装饰品装饰了其中一些松树。
We passed an Arctic hare—very white and surprisingly large—and then a family of reindeer.
我们经过了一只北极兔——非常白而且大得惊人——然后是一群驯鹿。
After about an hour, we reached a spot where, across the valley, a tongue of ice spilled over a ridge.
大约一个小时后，我们到达了山谷对面的一个地方，那里有一条冰舌从山脊上溢出。
Tedesco identified the tongue as belonging to the Russell Glacier.
特德斯科确认舌头属于拉塞尔冰川。
(In addition to the ice sheet, which is essentially one enormous glacier, Greenland also has thousands of smaller, peripheral glaciers.) We stopped to take a better look.
（除了本质上是一个巨大冰川的冰盖之外，格陵兰岛还有数千个较小的外围冰川。）我们停下来仔细观察。
When Tedesco first travelled the VW road, Russell ended in a dramatic wall of ice.
当特德斯科第一次沿着大众汽车公路行驶时，拉塞尔以戏剧性的冰墙结束。
Now the wall is gone, and the glacier looks deflated—more like an ice doormat.
现在墙已经消失了，冰川看起来瘪了——更像是一块冰门垫。
Tedesco compared visiting Russell to calling on a friend with a terminal illness.
特德斯科将拜访拉塞尔比作拜访一位身患绝症的朋友。
“You have to have the strength to say goodbye,” he said.
“你必须有力量说再见，”他说。
“You see this and you say, ‘Oh, man, it’s happening really fast.’ ”
“你看到这个，你会说，‘哦，伙计，这一切发生得真快。’”
The VW road originally ran from Kangerlussuaq all the way to the ice sheet.
大众公路最初从康克鲁斯瓦克一直延伸到冰盖。
Thanks to melt, it no longer gets there.
感谢融化，它不再到达那里。
Instead, it gives out a half mile short, at a huge pile of dirt and jumbled rock—a moraine in the making.
相反，它发出了半英里短的距离，在一大堆泥土和杂乱的岩石上——正在形成的冰碛。
We parked near an old bulldozer that seemed to be rusting into the ground.
我们把车停在一台旧推土机附近，它似乎已经生锈到地下了。
Tedesco and Colosio strapped on backpacks filled with equipment, and we began hiking over the rubble.
特德斯科和科洛西奥背上装满装备的背包，我们开始在废墟上徒步旅行。
It was cloudy and a relatively balmy forty degrees.
天气多云，气温相对温和，四十度。
(The average annual temperature in Kangerlussuaq is around twenty-four degrees Fahrenheit, compared with about minus twenty degrees at Summit.) “ Speriamo che non piova ,” Colosio remarked.
（康克鲁斯瓦克的年平均气温约为二十四华氏度，而萨米特的年平均气温约为零下二十度。）“Speriamo che non piova”，Colosio 说道。
(Let’s hope it doesn’t rain.) We reached the edge of the ice sheet, which was so thin that we could walk right onto it, as you would step onto a curb.
（希望不要下雨。）我们到达了冰盖的边缘，冰盖非常薄，我们可以直接走在上面，就像你踩在路边一样。
There was meltwater everywhere, collecting in puddles and running in rivulets.
到处都是融水，积成水坑，流成小溪。
In some places, the rivulets had merged to form streams that had to be jumped across.
在一些地方，小溪汇合成小溪，必须跨越。
“If we come back in a few days, we’ll have to bring bathing suits,” Tedesco joked, laying down his backpack.
“如果我们几天后回来，我们就得带泳衣了，”特德斯科放下背包开玩笑说。
Tedesco’s goal for the expedition was to repeat the albedo measurements that he had made last year, to see how conditions had changed.
特德斯科此次探险的目标是重复他去年进行的反照率测量，以了解条件如何变化。
Once again, he’d brought along his drone.
他再次带来了无人机。
It was equipped with two sets of sensors—one to measure incoming radiation, from the sun, the other to measure outgoing radiation, reflected off the ice.
它配备了两组传感器，一组用于测量来自太阳的传入辐射，另一组用于测量从冰反射的传出辐射。
To calibrate the sensors, he laid out a plastic sheet checkered in black and white, like a signal flag.
为了校准传感器，他铺了一张黑白格子的塑料板，就像信号旗一样。
It was apparently a lot more high-tech than it looked.
它显然比看起来高科技得多。
“That little square cost me two thousand bucks,” he said.
“那个小方块花了我两千美元，”他说。
While Tedesco and Colosio tinkered with the drone, I wandered around.
当特德斯科和科洛西奥摆弄无人机时，我四处闲逛。
At Summit, it’s always very white because there’s always—or nearly always—fresh snow, and everyone wears goggles or sunglasses to prevent snow blindness.
在 Summit，天气总是很白，因为总是（或几乎总是）新雪，每个人都戴着护目镜或太阳镜以防止雪盲。
At the ice sheet’s ragged edge, whatever snow had fallen during the winter had, by mid-July, long melted away, and there was only ice, which came in many shades, all of them gray.
在冰盖参差不齐的边缘，冬天下的雪到七月中旬都早已融化，只剩下冰，冰有多种色调，全都是灰色的。
The ice was speckled with bits of dust, which glaciologists call cryoconite, and pocked with cryoconite holes, which form because dust absorbs sunlight more efficiently than ice does.
冰上散布着一些灰尘，冰川学家称之为冰石，冰块上布满了冰石孔，这些孔是由于灰尘比冰更有效地吸收阳光而形成的。
The surface was changing so quickly that I could watch as neighboring holes merged to form pools.
表面变化如此之快，我可以看到相邻的洞合并形成水池。
I also came upon a much larger hole, maybe twenty feet across and perfectly round, that went straight down.
我还发现了一个更大的洞，大约二十英尺宽，呈圆形，直接向下延伸。
It had, I figured, once been a moulin, which is a shaft tunnelled out by a river of meltwater.
我想，它曾经是一个磨坊，是一条由融水河挖出的竖井。
When they’re full, moulins are spectacularly beautiful and equally dangerous.
当它们吃饱的时候，红磨坊非常美丽，但同样危险。
This one was empty and dingy, with blackened edges.
这个房间又空又脏，边缘发黑。
It looked like some kind of side entrance to the underworld.
它看起来像是某种通往地下世界的侧门。
I wandered back.
我又徘徊了回去。
The drone was flying, making a series of parallel passes over the ice.
无人机在飞行中，在冰面上进行一系列平行飞越。
Tedesco was following its progress on the video screen of his remote control.
特德斯科正在遥控器的视频屏幕上关注其进展情况。
He told me about a film he wanted to make that would feature mournful music and footage of the ice sheet taken from above.
他告诉我他想拍一部以悲伤的音乐和从上方拍摄的冰盖镜头为特色的电影。
It would last exactly nine minutes and seventeen seconds, because the density of pure ice is nine hundred and seventeen kilograms per cubic metre.
它会持续九分十七秒，因为纯冰的密度是每立方米九百一十七公斤。
“I want people to really feel the ice,” he said.
“我希望人们真正感受到冰，”他说。
“I think it’s important for people to realize that we’re doing this and we are responsible.
“我认为让人们意识到我们正在这样做并且我们有责任是很重要的。
We have to look at ourselves in the mirror, right?”
我们得照照镜子，对吧？”
Once you go looking for feedbacks, you start to see them just about everywhere.
一旦你去寻找反馈，你就会发现它们几乎无处不在。
On Greenland, the ice sheet isn’t just getting darker; large sections of it are losing elevation.
在格陵兰岛，冰盖不仅变得更暗，而且还变得更暗。它的大部分正在失去高度。
Because temperature and altitude are inversely related—imagine descending a mountain—this is bringing the ice into contact with warmer air, leading to melt, leading to further loss of elevation.
因为温度和海拔高度成反比（想象一下从山上下来），这会使冰与温暖的空气接触，导致融化，导致海拔进一步下降。
Across the Arctic, permafrost is thawing.
整个北极的永久冻土正在融化。
In the process, it’s releasing carbon dioxide and methane—an even more powerful greenhouse gas—producing more warming and more thawing.
在此过程中，它释放出二氧化碳和甲烷——一种更强大的温室气体——导致更多的变暖和更多的融化。
Canada’s boreal forest is another vast carbon storehouse.
加拿大的北方森林是另一个巨大的碳库。
Owing to bigger and more intense wildfires, the forest is giving up its CO 2 and so encouraging more fires.
由于野火规模更大、强度更大，森林正在释放 CO 2 ，从而助长更多火灾。
Much the same thing is happening in the American West.
美国西部也发生着同样的事情。
Key to the survival of the Amazon rain forest is rain generated by the forest itself: moisture evaporating off the leaves condenses into clouds that then drop their water on the trees.
亚马逊雨林生存的关键是森林本身产生的雨水：从树叶上蒸发的水分凝结成云，然后将水滴到树木上。
As droughts in the Amazon intensify and deforestation continues, the rain forest is shrinking, fostering deeper droughts and further shrinkage.
随着亚马逊地区干旱的加剧和森林砍伐的持续，雨林正在萎缩，导致更严重的干旱和进一步的萎缩。
Like the Greenland ice sheet and the AMOC , the Amazon is considered a potential tipping system; without sufficient rainfall, large parts of it could turn into grassland.
与格陵兰冰盖和 AMOC 一样，亚马逊河也被认为是一个潜在的倾倒系统。如果没有足够的降雨，大部分地区可能会变成草地。
The existence of so many amplifying feedbacks—and the possibility of crossing multiple tipping points—increases the risk associated with every additional bit of warming, though by how much, exactly, no one can say.
如此多的放大反馈的存在，以及跨越多个临界点的可能性，每增加一点变暖都会增加风险，但具体增加多少，没有人能说清楚。
In a paper published last year, a group of scientists from Europe and the U.S. identified twenty-seven positive, or intensifying, feedback loops in the climate system and only seven negative, or dampening, ones.
在去年发表的一篇论文中，来自欧洲和美国的一组科学家发现了气候系统中的 27 个积极的或强化的反馈循环，而只有 7 个消极的或抑制的反馈循环。
(A key negative feedback—the so-called Planck feedback—involves the fact that a warmer planet radiates more energy out to space.) They warned that feedback loops could feed on one another and that this could result in a “sequence of climate tipping points being exceeded, producing ‘climate cascades.’ ”
（一个关键的负反馈，即所谓的普朗克反馈，涉及到这样一个事实，即地球变暖会向太空辐射更多的能量。）他们警告说，反馈循环可能会相互影响，这可能会导致“一系列气候临界点被超过，产生‘气候级联’”。
An iceberg near Ilulissat, where the climate has changed dramatically in recent years.
伊卢利萨特附近的一座冰山，近年来那里的气候发生了巨大的变化。
In 2015, when world leaders agreed in Paris to try to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it was hoped that this would minimize the damage from feedbacks and prevent the world from crossing dangerous thresholds.
2015年，当世界领导人在巴黎同意努力将全球气温上升限制在1.5摄氏度之内时，人们希望这能最大限度地减少反馈造成的损害，并防止世界跨越危险的阈值。
Already, by some measures, temperatures have crept above that limit.
从某些方面来看，气温已经超过了这个极限。
According to the research group Berkeley Earth, over the past year they have averaged 1.66 degrees above preindustrial levels, and according to Copernicus, part of the European Union’s space program, they have averaged 1.64 degrees above those levels.
根据伯克利地球研究小组的数据，在过去的一年里，它们的平均气温比工业化前水平高出 1.66 度，而根据欧盟太空计划一部分的哥白尼的数据，它们的平均气温比这些水平高出 1.64 度。
“The 1.5-degree limit is deader than a doornail,” the former NASA climate scientist James Hansen, who is sometimes referred to as the father of global warming, has said.
“1.5 度的气温限制比门钉还要致命，”有时被称为全球变暖之父的美国宇航局前气候科学家詹姆斯·汉森 (James Hansen) 表示。
The world might need to spend decades at 1.5 degrees before triggering the tipping points associated with this temperature, but that is slim comfort, as in coming decades temperatures will almost certainly continue to rise.
世界可能需要在 1.5 度的气温下持续数十年才能触发与这一温度相关的临界点，但这并不能令人感到安慰，因为在未来几十年里，气温几乎肯定会继续上升。
There is, in principle, nothing wrong with a warmer world, or even one whose climate bounces around.
原则上，世界变暖，甚至气候反复变化，都没有什么问题。
At many points in history, the Earth has been much hotter than it is today.
在历史上的许多时期，地球都比现在要热得多。
During a period known as the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, for instance, around ninety million years ago, breadfruit trees grew on Greenland, and a rain forest thrived on Antarctica.
例如，在大约九千万年前的白垩纪最热时期，面包果树在格陵兰岛生长，雨林在南极洲繁衍生息。
During the Wisconsin, as temperatures yo-yoed up and down, people were living in Africa, Europe, Asia, Australia, and quite possibly North and South America.
在威斯康星州期间，随着气温忽高忽低，人们生活在非洲、欧洲、亚洲、澳大利亚，很可能还生活在北美和南美。
Some of them managed to get by, or we wouldn’t be here.
他们中的一些人设法渡过难关，否则我们就不会在这里。
But the society we have now was built for the climate we have now, or at least a close approximation of it.
但我们现在的社会是根据我们现在的气候而建立的，或者至少是非常接近的。
Alter the world by, say, drowning Dhaka or Shanghai and all sorts of knock-on effects follow.
例如，通过淹没达卡或上海来改变世界，随之而来的是各种连锁反应。
Last year’s report on global tipping points—the one produced by more than two hundred researchers—predicted that “escalating climate change” will increase “the risk of violent conflict” and that this, in turn, will “undermine societies’ ability to cooperate,” leading to yet more climate change.
去年由两百多名研究人员编写的全球临界点报告预测，“气候变化不断升级”将增加“暴力冲突的风险”，而这反过来又将“削弱社会的合作能力”，导致更多的气候变化。
The roughly six trillion tons of ice that Greenland has lost translates to enough water to cover the Eastern Seaboard to a depth of eighteen feet.
格陵兰岛失去的大约六万亿吨冰转化为足够的水覆盖东海岸十八英尺深。
Roughly half the loss has come from surface melt, the other half from an increase in the discharge of icebergs.
大约一半的损失来自地表融化，另一半来自冰山排放的增加。
From Kangerlussuaq, I flew to the town of Ilulissat, which is sometimes called the “iceberg capital of the world.” (The town’s name, in fact, means “icebergs.”) Some hundred and fifty miles north of Kanger, Ilulissat sits on Disko Bay, at the mouth of another very long fjord.
从康克鲁斯瓦克出发，我飞往伊卢利萨特镇，这里有时被称为“世界冰山之都”。 （事实上，该镇的名字的意思是“冰山”。）伊卢利萨特位于康尔以北约一百五十英里处，坐落在迪斯科湾，位于另一个很长的峡湾的入口处。
Icebergs break off into the fjord and float along until they hit an underwater sill just south of town.
冰山断裂进入峡湾并漂浮，直到撞到城镇南边的水下岩台上。
The bigger icebergs get stuck on the sill, and other icebergs pile up behind them, in a great glacial traffic jam.
较大的冰山被卡在窗台上，其他冰山则堆积在它们后面，形成巨大的冰川交通堵塞。
A few years ago, the Greenlandic government opened a museum not far from the ice jam, and on my first day in town I went to talk to its director, Karl Sandgreen.
几年前，格陵兰政府在距离冰塞不远的地方开设了一家博物馆，我到城的第一天就去采访了博物馆馆长卡尔·桑德格林(Karl Sandgreen)。
From the outside, the Icefjord Centre looks like a cross between a milking barn and a concert hall, with lots of metal beams and a roof that meets in a swale instead of a peak.
从外面看，冰峡湾中心看起来就像挤奶谷仓和音乐厅的结合体，有很多金属梁和屋顶，屋顶是洼地而不是山峰。
At the entrance, visitors are instructed to remove their shoes and put on felt slippers.
在入口处，游客被要求脱掉鞋子并穿上毛毡拖鞋。
Inside, the design is pure Scandinavian minimalism.
内部的设计是纯粹的斯堪的纳维亚极简主义。
Sandgreen met me in the museum’s window-lined café.
桑德格林在博物馆靠窗的咖啡馆里遇见了我。
We chatted for a bit about Ilulissat’s history prior to colonization.
我们聊了一些伊卢利萨特在殖民之前的历史。
Just beyond the museum lie the remains of an ancient settlement that was serially occupied by three different cultures: the Saqqaq, the Dorset, and the Thule.
博物馆外面是一个古代定居点的遗迹，这里曾先后被三种不同的文化占据：萨卡克人、多塞特人和图勒人。
The first two groups died out—the Saqqaq around three thousand years ago, the Dorset around a thousand years ago—for reasons that are unknown.
前两个群体——大约三千年前的萨卡克人，大约一千年前的多塞特人——灭绝的原因尚不清楚。
Contemporary Greenlanders are descendants of the Thule, who arrived on the island from what’s now the Canadian Arctic around the year 1200.
当代格陵兰人是图勒人的后裔，他们于 1200 年左右从现在的加拿大北极地区来到了该岛。
(The Thule are sometimes called the proto-Inuit.) “We are from the Thule culture,” Sandgreen told me.
（图勒人有时被称为原始因纽特人。）“我们来自图勒文化，”桑德格林告诉我。
Sandgreen, who is forty-five, was born and raised in Ilulissat, which was—and still is—an important fishery.
四十五岁的桑德格林在伊卢利萨特出生和长大，这里曾经是、现在仍然是一个重要的渔场。
His father fished for prawns in Disko Bay, and he would have done the same had his parents not encouraged him to get more education, in Denmark.
他的父亲在迪斯科湾捕虾，如果他的父母没有鼓励他去丹麦接受更多教育，他也会做同样的事情。
“I’m very happy I listened to them,” he said.
“我很高兴听到了他们的意见，”他说。
We went to take a look at the Centre’s exhibits.
我们去参观了中心的展品。
There were some Thule artifacts and an animation showing how the calving front of the Jakobshavn Glacier—the source of Ilulissat’s icebergs—has moved over time.
其中有一些图勒文物和动画，展示了雅各布港冰川（伊卢利萨特冰山的来源）的崩解前缘如何随着时间的推移而移动。
Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, the front has retreated some fifteen miles up the fjord.
自十九世纪九十年代中期以来，前沿已向峡湾后退了约十五英里。
At the Centre’s center, a set of glass cases displayed sections of an ice core from a site known as EGRIP .
在中心的中心，一组玻璃柜展示了来自 EGRIP 地点的冰芯部分。
(The core, which was drilled by a Danish team about two hundred miles northeast of Summit, was completed just last year.) Though the cases were refrigerated, the ice cylinders were dripping.
（核心由丹麦团队在峰会东北约 200 英里处钻探，去年刚刚完成。）虽然箱子被冷藏，但冰筒仍在滴水。
“We are very concerned about how they’re melting so fast,” Sandgreen said.
桑德格林说：“我们非常担心它们融化得如此之快。”
“We’re going to have to get some new ones.”
“我们必须买一些新的。”
“I saw the best minds of my generation drown in shallow pools of apple-cider vinegar mixed with dish soap.” Cartoon by Ngozi Ukazu Link copied
“我看到我们这一代人中最优秀的人才被淹没在苹果醋和洗洁精混合的浅池中。” Ngozi Ukazu 的漫画 链接已复制
Sandgreen told me that Ilulissat’s climate had changed dramatically since he was a boy.
桑德格林告诉我，自从他还是个孩子的时候起，伊卢利萨特的气候就发生了巨大的变化。
It used to be that Disko Bay froze over every winter and people rode dogsleds over the ice to hunt.
以前，迪斯科湾每年冬天都会结冰，人们骑着狗拉雪橇在冰上狩猎。
Now the bay no longer freezes, and it doesn’t pay to keep dogs, so the town’s canine population, which used to number almost ten thousand—twice as high as the number of humans—has dropped to around seventeen hundred.
现在海湾不再结冰，而且养狗也不费钱，所以小镇上的狗数量从过去的近万只（是人类数量的两倍）下降到了一千七百只左右。
“Also, the temperature,” Sandgreen said.
“还有温度，”桑德格林说。
“When I was a teen-ager, I remember minus forty degrees Celsius was just normal.
“当我十几岁的时候，我记得零下四十摄氏度是正常的。
But after this climate change the air has become moister.
但在这次气候变化之后，空气变得更加潮湿。
So now, when it’s, like, minus ten degrees, it feels colder than minus forty.” (Minus forty degrees Celsius is also minus forty degrees Fahrenheit; minus ten degrees C is fourteen degrees F.)
所以现在，当气温为零下十度时，感觉比零下四十度还冷。” （零下四十摄氏度也是零下四十华氏度；零下十摄氏度就是十四华氏度。）
I asked Sandgreen what message he hoped people would take from the Icefjord Centre.
我问桑德格林，他希望人们从冰峡湾中心得到什么信息。
He told me that a lot of politicians had visited Ilulissat, including the former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.
他告诉我，很多政治家都访问过伊卢利萨特，其中包括美国前国务卿约翰·克里。
“They’re coming here to see the climate change, to tell the rest of the people in the world what is happening,” he said.
“他们来这里是为了看看气候变化，告诉世界上其他人正在发生什么，”他说。
But he didn’t believe that it would make much difference: “I think we are too few people in Greenland to tell the people in the rest of the world to do something.”
但他认为这不会产生太大影响：“我认为我们格陵兰岛的人口太少，无法告诉世界其他地方的人们做点什么。”
The next day, I went back to the Icefjord Centre, and then kept on walking, along a boardwalk that crosses a stretch of spongy tundra.
第二天，我回到冰峡湾中心，然后沿着一条穿过一片松软苔原的木板路继续行走。
The stretch, which borders the fjord, was the site of the ancient settlement, though you wouldn’t know that by looking at it.
与峡湾接壤的这片土地是古代定居点的所在地，尽管你不会通过观察它来知道这一点。
In an apparent violation of the rules, two women in red vests were trudging along on the tundra itself.
两名身穿红色背心的妇女在苔原上艰难前行，这显然违反了规定。
They turned out to be American scientists, there to study erosion.
原来他们是美国科学家，在那里研究侵蚀。
As the permafrost in the area degrades, the remains of the old settlement are, they told me, collapsing into the sea.
他们告诉我，随着该地区永久冻土的退化，旧定居点的遗迹正在崩塌入海。
I kept walking.
我继续走着。
It was a spectacular day, and there was a wonderful scent in the air—a bit like thyme and a bit like lemon.
这是美好的一天，空气中弥漫着一种美妙的香味——有点像百里香，又有点像柠檬。
I thought of Tedesco’s museum of Arctic smells.
我想到了特德斯科的北极气味博物馆。
The boardwalk curled east and then ascended a rocky ridge.
木板路向东蜿蜒，然后登上岩石山脊。
From the ridgetop, there was a view directly onto the ice jam: a floating mountain range with slopes of pure white.
从山脊顶上，可以直接看到冰塞：一座漂浮的山脉，山坡是纯白色的。
The reflections of the icebergs quavered in the water, which was blue to the edge of purple.
冰山的倒影在蓝色到紫色边缘的水中颤抖。
The smaller bergs were the size of a house; the bigger ones, I figured, were the size of Grand Central Terminal.
较小的冰山有房子那么大；我想，更大的有中央车站那么大。
A couple arrived right behind me.
一对夫妇就在我身后到达。
“Oh, my God,” the woman exclaimed in American-accented English.
“哦，我的上帝，”女人用美国口音的英语惊呼道。
“This is unbelievable!”
“这太难以置信了！”
The icebergs’ source, the Jakobshavn Glacier, is sometimes called an outlet glacier and sometimes an ice stream.
冰山的源头雅各布港冰川有时被称为出口冰川，有时被称为冰流。
Ice is always flowing, albeit slowly, from the center of the ice sheet toward the edges.
冰总是从冰原的中心流向边缘，尽管速度很慢。
In an ice stream, it flows particularly quickly.
在冰流中，水流特别快。
As Jakobshavn’s calving front retreated, it also thinned, and the glacier’s speed—already brisk for a block of ice—increased.
随着雅各布港的崩解前沿后退，它也变薄了，而冰川的速度（已经足以成为一块冰）增加了。
In 2012, its flow rate exceeded a hundred and fifty feet a day, which is believed to be a glacial world record.
2012年，其流量超过每天一百五十英尺，这被认为是冰川世界纪录。
Though it has since slowed down again, the glacier has still been losing a lot of ice—during the past few decades, some ninety billion tons of it.
尽管此后速度再次放缓，但冰川仍然在流失大量冰——在过去的几十年里，流失量约为 900 亿吨。
(All on its own, Jakobshavn is believed to be responsible for more than one per cent of global sea-level rise since 2000.)
（据信，自 2000 年以来，雅各布港本身就造成了全球海平面上升的百分之一以上。）
The key driver of Jakobshavn’s losses appears to be rising water temperatures in Disko Bay.
雅各布港损失的主要驱动因素似乎是迪斯科湾水温上升。
As warmer water makes its way up the fjord, it is melting the glacier’s front from below, or so the theory goes.
当温暖的海水沿着峡湾向上流动时，它会从下方融化冰川的前缘，至少理论上是这样的。
To prevent this from continuing, a group of scientists in 2018 proposed artificially increasing the height of the iceberg-snagging sill.
为了防止这种情况继续下去，一群科学家在 2018 年提议人为增加冰山阻碍的门槛的高度。
The sill, which stretches across the mouth of the fjord for three miles, now sits about a thousand feet below sea level.
岩坎横跨峡湾口，绵延三英里，现在位于海平面以下约一千英尺。
Topping it with a three-hundred-foot-tall berm would, the group argued, “reduce the volume of warm water” pushing up the fjord and hence “slow the melting.” Construction of such a berm, the researchers calculated, would require about three and a half billion cubic feet of gravel and sand, which, conveniently enough, could be excavated from Greenland’s continental shelf.
该组织认为，在其顶部建造一个三百英尺高的护堤将“减少温暖的水量”推高峡湾，从而“减缓融化速度”。研究人员计算出，建造这样的护堤需要大约三十亿立方英尺的砾石和沙子，而这些砾石和沙子可以很方便地从格陵兰岛的大陆架上挖掘出来。
A sled dog just outside Ilulissat, where it was once possible to hunt on a frozen bay.
伊卢利萨特郊外的一只雪橇犬，曾经可以在冰冻的海湾上狩猎。
More recently, one of the researchers involved in that proposal, John C.
最近，参与该提案的研究人员之一 John C.
Moore, of the University of Lapland, in Finland, suggested an alternative fix: a three-mile-long curtain across the fjord.
芬兰拉普兰大学的摩尔提出了一个替代解决方案：在峡湾上安装一个三英里长的窗帘。
In an article published earlier this year, in the journal Climatic Change , Moore and several colleagues examined dozens of “emergency measures” that have been proposed to help conserve the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average.
在今年早些时候发表在《气候变化》杂志上的一篇文章中，摩尔和几位同事研究了数十项旨在帮助保护北极的“紧急措施”，北极变暖的速度是全球平均水平的四倍。
In addition to the underwater curtain, the schemes include pumping water onto the Arctic sea ice to thicken it and “brightening” the region’s clouds so that they reflect more sunlight.
除了水下帷幕外，这些计划还包括向北极海冰抽水以使其变厚，并“照亮”该地区的云层，使其反射更多的阳光。
The group argued that studying such “emergency measures” was important not because all—or even any—of them would work but because options are dwindling.
该组织认为，研究此类“紧急措施”很重要，不是因为所有措施（甚至任何措施）都有效，而是因为选择越来越少。
Interest in exploring such interventions is “most definitely growing,” the group wrote, owing to the “increasingly dire findings of the effects of warming in the North, and the obvious global impacts of climate-related disasters.”
该组织写道，由于“北方变暖的影响越来越可怕，以及气候相关灾害对全球的明显影响”，探索此类干预措施的兴趣“无疑正在增长”。
I spent a few hours at the ice jam, basically just admiring the view.
我在ice jam呆了几个小时，基本上只是欣赏风景。
A cruise ship had docked in Ilulissat, and several people wearing jackets with the tour company’s insignia joined me on the ridge.
一艘游轮停靠在伊卢利萨特，几个穿着带有旅游公司徽章夹克的人在山脊上和我会合。
I asked a few of them why they had come to Greenland.
我问他们中的一些人为什么来到格陵兰岛。
An American woman told me she had already been to so many other exotic places, including Antarctica, that this was one of the few destinations left.
一位美国女士告诉我，她已经去过很多其他充满异国情调的地方，包括南极洲，这是为数不多的目的地之一。
A British woman said that climate change had influenced her choice: “We definitely made a point to see it now, before we lose it.” A Norwegian man who had travelled on his own told me that he had come to visit his brother, who was working at a destination restaurant just south of Ilulissat.
一位英国女士表示，气候变化影响了她的选择：“我们绝对想在失去它之前立即看到它。”一位独自旅行的挪威男子告诉我，他是来看望他的兄弟的，他的兄弟在伊卢利萨特以南的一家目的地餐厅工作。
(When I later looked up the restaurant, I found that the tasting menu, wine included, ran to seven hundred and forty-five dollars and might feature whale skin, musk ox, and reindeer.)
（当我后来查了一下这家餐厅时，我发现品尝菜单（包括葡萄酒）高达七百四十五美元，并且可能包含鲸皮、麝牛和驯鹿。）
Until the Second World War, Greenland was more or less inaccessible to outsiders.
在第二次世界大战之前，格陵兰岛或多或少地对外人来说是无法进入的。
It could be reached only by boat, and the Danes, who at that point considered it a colony, made it hard for foreigners to visit, ostensibly to protect the island’s population from the destructive trends of modernity.
它只能乘船到达，而丹麦人当时认为它是一个殖民地，因此禁止外国人访问，表面上是为了保护岛上的居民免受现代性破坏趋势的影响。
Many Greenlanders still lived, if not exactly as their ancestors had, without electricity or running water.
许多格陵兰人仍然生活在没有电或自来水的情况下，即使不是完全像他们的祖先那样。
Following the war, Greenland modernized rapidly—so rapidly that one scholar described it as having transitioned “from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in less than twenty-five years.” Today, Greenland is eagerly courting foreigners.
战后，格陵兰岛迅速实现现代化——速度如此之快，以至于一位学者将其描述为“在不到二十五年的时间里从中世纪过渡到二十世纪”。如今，格陵兰岛正在热切地吸引外国人。
A new international airport has been built in Nuuk, and another is under construction in Ilulissat.
努克已建成一个新国际机场，伊卢利萨特另一个机场正在建设中。
From the ridge overlooking the ice jam, I could see a cloud of dust rising from the construction site.
从山脊上俯瞰冰堵，我可以看到建筑工地升起一团灰尘。
The new airports will bring more visitors to Greenland to see the melting ice, and the increase in air travel will melt more ice—another potential feedback loop.
新机场将吸引更多游客前往格陵兰岛观看融化的冰，而航空旅行的增加将融化更多的冰——另一个潜在的反馈循环。
No one desires this outcome—not the travellers and certainly not the Greenlanders, whose attachment to the ice is profound.
没有人希望看到这样的结果——旅行者们不希望看到这样的结果，当然格陵兰人也不希望看到这样的结果，因为他们对冰雪有着深厚的依恋。
But everyone pushes ahead anyway.
但无论如何，每个人都在前进。
Climate change is not like other problems, and that is part of the problem.
气候变化与其他问题不同，这是问题的一部分。
What it lacks in vividness and immediacy it makes up for in reach.
它缺乏生动性和即时性，但它的影响力弥补了这一点。
Once the world’s remaining mountain glaciers disappear, they won’t be coming back.
一旦世界上剩余的山地冰川消失，它们就不会再回来。
Nor will the coral reefs or the Amazon rain forest.
珊瑚礁或亚马逊雨林也不会。
If we cross the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, we may not even notice.
如果我们跨越格陵兰冰盖的临界点，我们甚至可能不会注意到。
And yet the world as we know it will be gone.
然而我们所知道的世界将会消失。
♦
❖
An earlier version of this article misstated the density of pure ice.
本文的早期版本错误地描述了纯冰的密度。
What happened when the Hallmark Channel “ leaned into Christmas .”
当霍尔马克频道“接近圣诞节”时发生了什么？