The Mysterious, Deep-Dwelling Microbes That Sculpt Our Planet

Earth’s crust teems with subterranean life that we are only now beginning to understand.

地壳中充满了我们现在才刚刚开始了解的地下生命。

Credit...

信用...

Illustration by Brian Rea.

布赖恩·雷绘制的插图。

Animation By Delcan & Co.

动画制作：Delcan & Co.

Ferris Jabr is a contributing writer at the magazine and the author of “Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life,” from which this article is adapted.

Ferris Jabr 是该杂志的特约撰稿人，也是《成为地球：我们的星球如何诞生》一书的作者，本文改编自该书。

In the middle of North America, there is a portal to the deep recesses of Earth’s rocky interior.

在北美中部，有一个通往地球岩石内部深处的入口。

The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, expos­ing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering con­stellations of gold.

入口处是一个约半英里宽的深坑，螺旋式深入地下 1,250 英尺，露出由年轻和古老岩石组成的大理石马赛克：灰色的玄武岩带、乳白色的石英脉和闪闪发光的金色星座。

Beneath the pit, some 370 miles of tunnels twist through solid rock, extending more than 1.5 miles below the surface.

在矿坑下方，约 370 英里长的隧道蜿蜒穿过坚固的岩石，延伸至地表以下 1.5 英里以上。

For 126 years, this site in Lead, S.D., housed the Homestake Mine, the deepest and most productive gold mine on the continent.

126 年来，位于南达科他州利德市的霍姆斯特克金矿 (Homestake Mine) 一直是该大陆最深、产量最高的金矿。

In 2006, the Barrick Gold Corporation donated the mine to the state of South Dakota, which converted it into the largest subterranean laboratory in the United States, the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

2006年，巴里克黄金公司将该矿捐赠给南达科他州，南达科他州将其改造成美国最大的地下实验室——桑福德地下研究设施。

Although the lowest tunnels flooded after mining ceased, it is still possible to descend nearly a mile beneath the planet’s surface.

尽管采矿停止后最低的隧道被淹没，但仍有可能下降到地球表面以下近一英里。

Most of the sci­entists who do so are physicists conducting highly sensitive experi­ments that must be shielded from interfering cosmic rays.

大多数这样做的科学家都是物理学家，他们进行高度敏感的实验，必须避免宇宙射线的干扰。

But a few biologists also venture into the underground labyrinth, typically seeking its dankest and dirtiest corners — places where obscure creatures extrude metal and transfigure rock.

但一些生物学家也冒险进入地下迷宫，通常寻找最潮湿、最肮脏的角落——那些不起眼的生物挤压金属和变形岩石的地方。

On a bitingly cold December morning, I followed three young sci­entists and a group of Sanford employees into “the cage” — the bare metal elevator that would take us 4,850 feet into Earth’s crust.

12 月一个寒冷刺骨的早晨，我跟随三位年轻科学家和一群桑福德员工进入“笼子”——一部裸露的金属电梯，它将带我们深入地壳 4,850 英尺。

We wore neon vests, steel-toed boots and hard hats.

我们穿着霓虹灯背心、钢头靴子和安全帽。

Strapped to our belts were per­sonal respirators, which would protect us from carbon monoxide in the event of a fire or explosion.

我们的腰带上绑着个人呼吸器，在发生火灾或爆炸时，它可以保护我们免受一氧化碳的伤害。

The cage descended swiftly and sur­prisingly smoothly.

笼子下降的速度很快，而且出奇的平稳。

Our idle chatter and laughter were just audible over the din of unspooling cables and whooshing air.

我们闲聊和笑声的声音盖过了电缆松开的喧闹声和呼啸的空气声。

After a controlled plum­met of about 10 minutes, we reached the bottom of the facility.

经过大约 10 分钟的受控垂直下降后，我们到达了设施的底部。

Our two guides, both former miners, directed us into a pair of small linked rail cars and drove us through a series of narrow tunnels.

我们的两位导游都曾是矿工，他们引导我们进入两辆相连的小型轨道车，并带我们穿过一系列狭窄的隧道。

Within 20 minutes, we had traded the relatively cool and well-ventilated region near the cage for an increasingly hot and muggy corridor.

20分钟之内，我们就把笼子附近相对凉爽、通风良好的区域换成了越来越闷热的走廊。

Whereas the surface world was snowy and well below freez­ing, a mile down it was about 90 degrees with nearly 100 percent humidity.

尽管地表世界白雪皑皑，远低于冰点，但一英里深处温度约为 90 度，湿度接近 100%。

Heat seemed to pulse through the rock surrounding us, and the air was thick and cloying; the smell of brimstone seeped into our nostrils.

热量似乎在我们周围的岩石中脉动，空气粘稠而令人腻味。硫磺的气味渗入我们的鼻孔。

It felt as though we had entered hell’s foyer.

感觉就像我们进入了地狱的门厅。

The rail cars stopped.

火车停了下来。

We stepped out and walked a short distance to a large plastic spigot protruding from the rock.

我们走出去，走了一小段距离，来到了从岩石中伸出的一个大塑料龙头。

A pearly stream of water trickled from the wall near the faucet’s base, forming rivulets and pools.

一股珍珠色的水流从水龙头底座附近的墙上滴下来，形成小溪和水池。

Wafting from the water was hydrogen sulfide — the source of the chamber’s odor.

从水中飘出的是硫化氢——密室气味的来源。

Kneeling, I realized that the water was teeming with a stringy white material similar to the skin of a poached egg.

我跪下，发现水中充满了类似于荷包蛋皮的白色粘稠物质。

Caitlin Casar, a geobiologist, explained that the white fibers were microbes in the genus Thiothrix , which join together in long filaments and store sulfur in their cells, giving them a ghostly hue.

地球生物学家凯特琳·卡萨尔 (Caitlin Casar) 解释说，这些白色纤维是硫丝菌属的微生物，它们以长丝连接在一起，并在细胞中储存硫，使它们呈现出幽灵般的色调。

Here we were, deep within Earth’s crust — a place where, without human intervention, there would be no light and little oxygen — yet life was literally gush­ing from rock.

我们在这里，在地壳深处——如果没有人类干预，这里不会有光，氧气也很少——但生命却确实从岩石中喷涌而出。

This particular ecological hot spot had earned the nick­name Thiothrix Falls.

这个特殊的生态热点赢得了“硫丝鸟瀑布”的绰号。

On a different level of the mine, we sloshed through mud and shin-high water, stepping carefully to avoid tripping on submerged rails and stray stones.

在矿井的另一层，我们在泥浆和小腿高的水中晃动，小心翼翼地行走，以免被淹没的铁轨和散落的石头绊倒。

Here and there, delicate white crystals, most likely gypsum or calcite, ornamented the ground and walls, glimmering like stars.

到处都是精致的白色晶体，很可能是石膏或方解石，装饰着地面和墙壁，像星星一样闪闪发光。

We eventually reached another large spigot mired in what looked like wet clay, which varied in color from pale salmon to brick red.

我们最终到达了另一个大龙头，它陷入了看起来像湿粘土的地方，颜色从淡鲑鱼色到砖红色不等。

This, too, Casar explained, was the work of microbes — in this case a genus known as Gallionella , which thrives in iron-rich waters and excretes twisted metal spires.

卡萨尔解释说，这也是微生物的杰作——在这种情况下，微生物属被称为加利奥氏菌属，它在富含铁的水中繁衍生息，并分泌出扭曲的金属尖顶。

At Casar’s request, I filled a jug with water, scooped microbe-rich mud into plastic tubes and stored them in coolers, where they would await analysis.

应卡萨尔的要求，我在一个罐子里装满了水，将富含微生物的泥浆舀进塑料管中，并将它们存放在冷却器中，等待分析。

Casar and her colleagues have visited the former Homestake Mine at least twice a year for many years.

卡萨尔和她的同事多年来每年至少两次参观前霍姆斯特克矿。

Every time they return, they encounter enigmatic microbes that have never been successfully grown in a labo­ratory and species that have not yet been named.

每次他们回来，都会遇到从未在实验室成功培养的神秘微生物和尚未命名的物种。

Their studies are part of a collaborative effort whose leaders include Magdalena Osburn, a professor at Northwestern University and a prominent member of the relatively new field known as geomicrobiology.

他们的研究是一项合作项目的一部分，该项目的领导者包括西北大学教授玛格达莱娜·奥斯本（Magdalena Osburn），她也是相对较新的地球微生物学领域的杰出成员。

Scientists like Osburn have shown that, contrary to long-held assumptions, Earth’s interior is not barren.

奥斯本等科学家已经证明，与长期以来的假设相反，地球内部并不贫瘠。

In fact, a majority of the planet’s microbes, perhaps more than 90 percent, may live deep un­derground.

事实上，地球上的大多数微生物（也许超过 90%）可能生活在地下深处。

These intraterrestrial microbes tend to be quite different from their counterparts on the surface.

这些陆地微生物往往与表面的微生物有很大不同。

They are ancient and slow, re­producing infrequently and possibly living for millions of years.

它们古老而缓慢，繁殖很少，可能寿命数百万年。

They often acquire energy in unusual ways, breathing rock instead of oxy­gen.

他们经常以不寻常的方式获取能量，呼吸岩石而不是氧气。

And they seem capable of weathering geological cataclysms that would annihilate most creatures.

它们似乎能够经受住足以消灭大多数生物的地质灾难。

Like the many tiny organisms in the ocean and atmosphere, the unique microbes within Earth’s crust do not simply inhabit their surroundings; they transform them.

与海洋和大气中的许多微小生物一样，地壳内的独特微生物不仅栖息在周围环境中，而且还栖息在周围环境中。他们改变了他们。

Subsurface microbes carve vast caverns, concentrate minerals and precious metals and regulate the global cycling of carbon and nutrients.

地下微生物挖掘出巨大的洞穴，浓缩矿物质和贵金属，并调节碳和营养物质的全球循环。

Microbes may even have helped construct the continents, literally laying the ground­work for all other terrestrial life.

微生物甚至可能帮助建造了大陆，为所有其他陆地生命奠定了基础。

Like so much about Earth’s earliest history, exactly where and when life first emerged is not definitively known.

就像地球最早的历史一样，生命最初出现的确切地点和时间尚不清楚。

At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells.

在我们的星球诞生后不久的某个时刻，在一些温暖、潮湿、具有正确化学反应和充足自由能流动的区域——温泉、撞击坑、海底热液喷口——地球的碎片重新排列成第一个自我复制的实体，最终进化成细胞。

Evidence from the fossil record and chemical analysis of the oldest rocks ever discovered indicate that mi­crobial life existed at least 3.5 billion years ago and possibly as far back as 4.2 billion years ago.

来自化石记录和对迄今为止发现的最古老岩石的化学分析的证据表明，微生物生命至少存在于 35 亿年前，甚至可能早在 42 亿年前。

Among all living creatures, the peculiar microbes that dwell deep within the planet’s crust today may most closely resemble some of the earliest single-celled organisms that ever existed.

在所有生物中，当今居住在地壳深处的奇特微生物可能与一些有史以来最早的单细胞生物最为相似。

Collectively, these subsurface microbes make up an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the biomass — that is, all the living matter — on Earth.

总的来说，这些地下微生物估计占地球上生物量（即所有生命物质）的 10% 到 20%。

Yet until the mid-20th century, most scientists did not think subterranean life of any kind was plausible below a few meters.

然而直到 20 世纪中叶，大多数科学家并不认为几米以下的地下存在任何形式的生命。

The oldest scientific reports of subsurface life date only to the 1600s.

关于地下生命最古老的科学报告只能追溯到 1600 年代。

In 1684, while traveling through central Slovenia, the naturalist Janez Vajkard Valvasor investigated rumors of a dragon living beneath a spring near Ljubljana.

1684 年，博物学家 Janez Vajkard Valvasor 在穿越斯洛文尼亚中部时调查了有关卢布尔雅那附近泉水下生活着一条龙的传言。

Local residents believed the dragon forced water to the surface every time it shifted its body.

当地居民相信，龙每次移动身体时都会迫使水流到地面。

After heavy rains, they sometimes found baby dragons washed up on rocks nearby: slender and sinuous with blunted snouts, frilled throats and nearly translucent pink skin.

大雨过后，他们有时会发现小龙被冲到附近的岩石上：细长而蜿蜒，有钝的鼻子、褶边的喉咙和近乎半透明的粉红色皮肤。

It was not for another century that naturalists formally identified the creatures as aquatic salamanders that lived exclusively underground in water flowing through limestone caves.

直到另一个世纪，博物学家才正式将这些生物识别为水生蝾螈，它们只生活在地下石灰岩洞穴中流经的水中。

They are now known as olms.

他们现在被称为 olms。

In the early 20th century, scientists started to get glimpses of the true abundance of life deep underground.

20世纪初，科学家们开始瞥见地下深处真正丰富的生命。

Around 1910, while try­ing to determine the source of methane gas in mines, German micro­biologists isolated bacteria from coal samples collected 3,600 feet below the surface.

1910 年左右，德国微生物学家在试图确定矿井中甲烷气体的来源时，从地表以下 3,600 英尺处采集的煤样中分离出了细菌。

In 1911, the Russian scientist V.

1911年，俄国科学家V.

L.

L。

Omelianski discovered viable bacteria preserved in permafrost alongside an unearthed mam­moth.

奥梅利安斯基在出土的猛犸象旁边发现了永久冻土中保存的活细菌。

Not long after that, Charles B.

不久之后，查尔斯·B.

Lip­man, a soil microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he had revived ancient bacterial spores trapped in chunks of coal obtained from a Pennsylvania mine.

加州大学伯克利分校的土壤微生物学家利普曼报告说，他已经复活了从宾夕法尼亚州矿井获得的煤块中捕获的古老细菌孢子。

Although these early studies were tantalizing, many scientists remained skeptical because of the possibility that surface microbes had contaminated the samples.

尽管这些早期研究很诱人，但许多科学家仍然持怀疑态度，因为表面微生物可能污染了样本。

In subsequent decades, however, researchers continued to find microbes in rock and water obtained from mines and drill sites all over the world.

然而，在接下来的几十年里，研究人员继续在从世界各地的矿山和钻探现场获得的岩石和水中发现微生物。

By the 1980s, attitudes had started to shift.

到了 20 世纪 80 年代，人们的态度开始发生转变。

Studies of aquifers clearly indicated that bacteria populated ground­water, even thousands of feet below the surface.

对含水层的研究清楚地表明，细菌遍布地下水，甚至在地表以下数千英尺处。

And scientists developed more rigorous methods for preventing the accidental introduction of surface mi­crobes, such as disinfecting drill bits and tracking the movement of fluids through the crust to make sure surface water was not mingling with their samples.

科学家们开发了更严格的方法来防止表面微生物的意外引入，例如对钻头进行消毒和跟踪流体在地壳中的运动，以确保地表水不会与样品混合。

Ultimately, the results of this research confirmed that, if anything, early proponents of a subterranean biosphere had been too conservative.

最终，这项研究的结果证实，如果说有什么不同的话，那就是地下生物圈的早期支持者过于保守。

Wherever scientists looked — within the continental crust, beneath the seafloor, under Antarctic ice — they found unique communities of microbes collectively con­taining thousands of unidentified species.

无论科学家在哪里观察——大陆地壳内、海底下方、南极冰层下——他们都会发现独特的微生物群落，其中包含数千种未知物种。

In certain pockets of the crust, there ap­peared to be as few as one microbe per cubic centimeter, equivalent to a country with only one person every 400 miles.

在地壳的某些区域，每立方厘米的微生物数量似乎只有一种，相当于一个国家每 400 英里只有一个人。

The under­world was real, but its inhabitants were much smaller and stranger than anyone had imagined.

地下世界是真实的，但里面的居民比任何人想象的都要小得多，也更加陌生。

In the 1990s, Thomas Gold, an astrophysicist at Cornell University, published a series of provocative claims about Earth’s inner microbial wilderness.

20 世纪 90 年代，康奈尔大学天体物理学家托马斯·戈尔德 (Thomas Gold) 发表了一系列有关地球内部微生物荒野的挑衅性主张。

Gold proposed that micro-organisms permeated the entire subsurface, living in fluid-filled pores between the grains in rocks.

戈尔德提出，微生物渗透到整个地下，生活在岩石颗粒之间充满液体的孔隙中。

Although scientists had not yet found microbes farther than 1.86 miles underground, Gold suspected that they lived as deep as six miles and that the biomass within the crust was at least equal to, if not greater than, that on the surface.

尽管科学家尚未在地下超过 1.86 英里的地方发现微生物，但戈尔德怀疑它们生活在六英里深处，并且地壳内的生物量至少等于（如果不是大于）地表生物量。

He further suggested that at least some branches of life may have originated in the planet’s interior; that other planets and moons might also harbor sub­terranean ecosystems; and that deep-dwelling microbes were likely to be the most common form of life throughout the cosmos.

他进一步提出，至少某些生命分支可能起源于地球内部。其他行星和卫星也可能拥有地下生态系统；深层微生物可能是整个宇宙中最常见的生命形式。

By the early 2000s, scientists started devising new ways to plunge even farther into Earth’s crust.

到 2000 年代初，科学家们开始设计新方法，进一步深入地壳。

Mines were particularly promising because they provided access to the remote subsurface without requiring much additional drilling or infra­structure.

矿山特别有前途，因为它们可以提供进入偏远地下的通道，而无需太多额外的钻探或基础设施。

Tullis Onstott, a professor of geosciences at Princeton Uni­versity, and his colleagues traveled to ultradeep gold mines in South Africa and retrieved samples of groundwater from nearly two miles underground.

普林斯顿大学地球科学教授图利斯·翁斯托特和他的同事前往南非的超深金矿，从地下近两英里处提取了地下水样本。

Within some of the deepest samples, they found a single species: a baguette-shaped bacterium with a whiplike tail that endured temperatures up to 140 degrees and acquired energy from the chemical by­products of radioactively decaying uranium embedded in its sunless home.

在一些最深的样本中，他们发现了一个物种：一种长棍形的细菌，尾巴像鞭子一样，可以承受高达 140 度的温度，并从埋藏在其没有阳光的家园中的放射性衰变铀的化学副产品中获取能量。

Onstott and his colleagues decided to name the microbe Desulforudis audaxviator, after a passage in Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which reads “descende, Audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges” — “descend, bold traveler, and you will attain the center of the Earth.” The water in which D.

昂斯托特和他的同事决定将这种微生物命名为 Desulforudis audaxviator，取自儒勒·凡尔纳的《地心之旅》中的一段话，其中写道“下降，Audax viator，et terrestre centrum attinges”——“下降，勇敢的旅行者，你将到达地球的中心。” D. 所含的水

audaxviator was discovered had not been disturbed for tens of millions of years at a minimum, suggesting that a population of these daring microbial terranauts may have sustained it­self for at least as long.

人们发现，audaxviator 至少在数千万年里没有受到干扰，这表明这些勇敢的微生物地球人的种群可能至少维持了同样长的时间。

“We do not normally think of rock as harbor­ing life,” Onstott writes in his book “Deep Life .” “Like most geologists, I too have viewed rocks as inanimate entities.” But now, he continues, as a geomicrobiologist, he sees all rocks as little worlds unto themselves, composed of micro-organisms, “some of which may have been living in the rock since its formation hundreds of millions of years ago.”

“我们通常不认为岩石蕴藏着生命，”翁斯托特在他的著作《深层生命》中写道。 “像大多数地质学家一样，我也将岩石视为无生命的实体。”但现在，作为一名地球微生物学家，他认为所有岩石都是由微生物组成的小世界，“其中一些微生物可能自数亿年前岩石形成以来就一直生活在岩石中。”

Some communities of subsurface microbes may be even older.

一些地下微生物群落可能更古老。

The Kidd Creek Mine in Ontario, Canada, is one of the largest and deepest mines in the world.

加拿大安大略省的基德溪矿是世界上最大、最深的矿井之一。

Extending about 1.86 miles below ground, it con­tains rich veins of copper, silver and zinc that formed nearly three billion years ago on the ocean floor.

它延伸到地下约 1.86 英里，含有丰富的铜、银和锌矿脉，这些矿脉是近 30 亿年前在海底形成的。

In 2013, the University of Toronto geologist Barbara Sherwood Lollar published a study demonstrating that some parcels of water in the Kidd Creek Mine have been isolated from the surface for more than a billion years, making it the oldest water ever discovered on Earth.

2013年，多伦多大学地质学家Barbara Sherwood Lollar发表了一项研究，表明基德溪矿中的一些水块已经与地表隔离了超过10亿年，使其成为地球上迄今为止发现的最古老的水。

Transparent when first collected, the iron-rich water turns a pale orange when exposed to oxygen; it has the consistency of maple sap, contains at least twice as much salt as modern seawater and, in Sherwood Lollar’s judg­ment, “tastes terrible.” In 2019, Sherwood Lollar, Magdalena Osburn and several colleagues confirmed that just like much younger fluids circulating through the pores and fissures in rock a few thousand feet below the surface, the billion-year-old water miles deep in Kidd Creek Mine is also populated by micro-organisms.

第一次收集时，富含铁的水是透明的，当暴露在氧气中时，它会变成淡橙色；它具有枫树汁的稠度，所含盐分至少是现代海水的两倍，而且根据舍伍德·洛拉尔的判断，“味道很糟糕”。 2019 年，舍伍德·洛拉尔 (Sherwood Lollar)、马格达莱娜·奥斯本 (Magdalena Osburn) 和几位同事证实，就像年轻的流体在地表以下数千英尺的岩石孔隙和裂缝中循环一样，基德溪矿井深处数十亿年前的水里也充满了微生物。

Although some of these microbial communities are likely a few hundred million years old at most, it is possible that others have continuously inhabited the deep crust for an eon or more.

尽管这些微生物群落中的一些可能最多有几亿年的历史，但其他微生物群落可能已经在地壳深处持续居住了亿万年或更长时间。

“This research really is a form of exploration,” Sherwood Lollar says.

“这项研究确实是一种探索形式，”舍伍德·洛拉尔说。

“Some of the findings are causing us to rewrite the textbooks about how this planet works.

“一些发现促使我们重写关于这个星球如何运作的教科书。

They are changing our understanding of Earth’s habitability.

它们正在改变我们对地球宜居性的理解。

We don’t know where life originated.

我们不知道生命起源于哪里。

We don’t know if life arose on the surface and went down or whether life emerged below and went up.

我们不知道生命是在地表出现然后下降，还是生命在地下出现然后上升。

There’s a tendency to think about Dar­win’s warm little pond, but, as my colleague T.

人们倾向于想到达尔文温暖的小池塘，但是，正如我的同事 T.

C.

C.

Onstott likes to say, it could just as easily have been some warm little fracture.”

翁斯托特喜欢说，这很可能是某种温暖的小骨折。”

Many years ago , I learned an astonishing fact that began to change the way I think about life’s relationship to the giant, tempestuous, half-molten rock we call home.

许多年前，我了解到一个惊人的事实，它开始改变我对生命与我们称之为家的巨大、狂暴、半熔化岩石之间关系的看法。

What I learned is this: Life on our planet does not simply experience the weather — it creates it.

我学到的是：我们星球上的生命不仅仅只是经历天气，而是创造天气。

Consider the Amazon rainforest.

考虑一下亚马逊雨林。

Every year, the Amazon is drenched in about eight feet of rain.

每年，亚马逊地区都会遭受约八英尺深的降雨。

In some parts of the forest, the annual rainfall is closer to 14 feet, more than five times the av­erage yearly precipitation across the contiguous United States.

在森林的某些地区，年降雨量接近 14 英尺，是美国本土年平均降水量的五倍多。

This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equa­torial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering moun­tains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense.

这场洪水在一定程度上是地理偶然性的结果：强烈的赤道阳光加速了水从海洋和陆地到天空的蒸发，信风从海洋带来水分，毗邻的山脉迫使进入的空气上升、冷却和凝结。

Rainforests happen where it happens to rain.

雨林出现在下雨的地方。

But that’s only half the story.

但这只是故事的一半。

Within the forest floor, vast sym­biotic networks of plant roots and filamentous fungi pull water from the soil into trunks, stems and leaves.

在森林地面内，植物根系和丝状真菌组成的巨大共生网络将土壤中的水分输送到树干、茎和叶中。

As the nearly 400 billion trees in the Amazon drink their fill, they release excess moisture, saturating the air with 20 billion tons of water vapor each day.

当亚马逊地区近 4000 亿棵树喝饱后，它们会释放出多余的水分，每天使空气充满 200 亿吨水蒸气。

At the same time, plants of all kinds secrete salts and emit bouquets of pungent gaseous compounds.

与此同时，各种植物都会分泌盐分并散发出刺激性气体化合物的气味。

Mushrooms, dainty as paper parasols or squat as door­knobs, exhale plumes of spores.

蘑菇，像纸阳伞一样精致，或者像门把手一样矮小，呼出孢子羽流。

The wind sweeps bacteria, pollen grains and bits of leaves and bark into the atmosphere.

风将细菌、花粉粒、树叶和树皮碎片吹到大气中。

The wet breath of the forest — peppered with microscopic life and organic residues — creates conditions that are highly conducive to rain.

森林的潮湿气息——充满了微生物和有机残留物——创造了非常有利于降雨的条件。

With so much water vapor in the air and so many minute particles on which the water can condense, clouds quickly form.

由于空气中存在如此多的水蒸气以及如此多的水可以凝结的微小颗粒，云很快就形成了。

In a typical year, the Amazon generates around half of its own rainfall.

通常情况下，亚马逊地区的降雨量约占其自身降雨量的一半。

The Amazon’s rain ritual challenges the way we typically think about life on Earth.

亚马逊的降雨仪式挑战了我们通常对地球生命的看法。

Conventional wisdom holds that life is sub­ject to its environment.

传统观点认为，生命受其环境的影响。

If Earth did not orbit a star of the right size and age, if it were too close or too far from that star, if it did not have a stable atmosphere, liquid water and a magnetic field that deflects harmful cosmic rays, it would be lifeless.

如果地球没有围绕一颗大小和年龄合适的恒星运行，如果它离恒星太近或太远，如果它没有稳定的大气层、液态水和偏转有害宇宙射线的磁场，它就会没有生命。

Life evolved on Earth be­cause Earth is suitable for life.

生命在地球上进化是因为地球适合生命生存。

Since Darwin, prevailing scientific para­digms have likewise emphasized that the ever-shifting demands of the environment largely dictate how life evolves: Species best able to cope with changes to their particular habitats leave behind the most descen­dants, whereas those that fail to adapt die out.

自达尔文以来，流行的科学范式同样强调，环境不断变化的需求在很大程度上决定了生命的进化方式：最能应对其特定栖息地变化的物种留下了最多的后代，而那些无法适应的物种则灭绝了。

Yet this truth has an underappreciated twin: Life changes its environ­ment, too.

然而，这个真理还有一个未被充分认识的双胞胎：生活也会改变它的环境。

In the mid-20th century, when ecology established itself as a formal discipline, this fact began to gain wider recognition in Western science.

20世纪中叶，当生态学确立为一门正式学科时，这一事实开始在西方科学中获得更广泛的认可。

Even so, the focus was on relatively small and local changes: a beaver constructing a dam, for instance, or earthworms churning a patch of soil.

即便如此，重点还是相对较小的局部变化：例如，海狸建造水坝，或者蚯蚓翻动一块土壤。

The notion that living creatures of all kinds might modify their environments in much more significant ways — that microbes, fungi, plants and animals can change the topography and climate of a continent or even the entire planet — was rarely given seri­ous consideration.

各种生物可能以更重要的方式改变它们的环境——微生物、真菌、植物和动物可以改变大陆甚至整个地球的地形和气候——这一观点很少得到认真考虑。

In recent decades, however, the sci­entific understanding of life’s relationship to the planet has been un­dergoing a major reformation.

然而，近几十年来，对生命与地球关系的科学理解正在经历重大变革。

Contrary to longstanding maxims, life has been a formidable geological force throughout Earth’s history, often matching or surpassing the power of glaciers, earthquakes and volcanoes.

与长期存在的格言相反，在整个地球历史上，生命一直是一股强大的地质力量，其力量往往可以与冰川、地震和火山相媲美或超越。

Over the past several billion years, all manner of life forms, from microbes to mammoths, have trans­formed the continents, ocean and atmosphere, turning a lump of or­biting rock into the world as we’ve known it.

在过去的数十亿年里，从微生物到猛犸象的各种生命形式已经改变了大陆、海洋和大气，将一块绕轨道运行的岩石变成了我们所熟知的世界。

Living creatures are not simply products of inexorable evolutionary processes in their particu­lar habitats; they are orchestrators of their environments and partici­pants in their own evolution.

生物不仅仅是其特定栖息地中不可阻挡的进化过程的产物；他们是环境的协调者和自身进化的参与者。

We and other living creatures are more than inhabitants of Earth.

我们和其他生物不仅仅是地球上的居民。

We are Earth: an outgrowth of its physical structure and an engine of its global cycles.

我们是地球：它的物理结构的产物和全球循环的引擎。

The evidence for this new paradigm is all around us, although much of it has been discovered only recently and has yet to permeate public consciousness to the same degree as, say, selfish genes or the microbiome.

这种新范式的证据就在我们身边，尽管其中大部分是最近才被发现的，并且尚未像自私基因或微生物组那样渗透到公众意识中。

The history of life on Earth is the his­tory of life’s remaking Earth.

地球生命的历史就是生命改造地球的历史。

Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffus­ing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which pro­tected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radia­tion.

近二十五亿年前，被称为蓝藻的光合海洋微生物永久地改变了地球，使大气充满氧气，使天空充满熟悉的蓝色，并开始形成臭氧层，保护新的生命浪潮免受有害的紫外线辐射。

Today plants and other photosynthetic organisms appear to help maintain a level of atmospheric oxygen high enough to support complex life but not so high that Earth would erupt in flames at the slightest spark.

如今，植物和其他光合生物似乎有助于维持大气中足够高的氧气水平，以支持复杂的生命，但又不会高到地球会因为轻微的火花而起火。

Marine plankton drive chemical cycles on which all other life depends and emit gases that increase cloud cover, modifying global climate.

海洋浮游生物驱动所有其他生命赖以生存的化学循环，并排放气体，增加云量，改变全球气候。

Kelp forests, coral reefs and shellfish store huge amounts of carbon, buffer ocean acidity, improve water quality and defend shorelines from se­vere weather.

海带森林、珊瑚礁和贝类储存了大量的碳，缓冲海洋酸度，改善水质并保护海岸线免受恶劣天气的影响。

Animals as diverse as elephants, prairie dogs and termites continually reconstruct the planet’s crust, facilitating the flow of water, air and nutrients and improving the prospects of millions of species.

大象、土拨鼠和白蚁等各种各样的动物不断地重建地球的地壳，促进水、空气和营养物质的流动，并改善数百万物种的前景。

And micro-organisms, like those I observed deep within Earth’s crust, are now thought to be important players in many geological pro­cesses.

微生物，就像我在地壳深处观察到的微生物一样，现在被认为是许多地质过程的重要参与者。

As I studied the interdependence of Earth and life, I continually returned to an ancient and controversial idea: that Earth itself is alive.

当我研究地球与生命的相互依存关系时，我不断地回到一个古老且有争议的想法：地球本身是有生命的。

It was not until the late 20th century that the idea of a living planet found one of its most popular and enduring expressions in Western science, the Gaia hypothesis.

直到 20 世纪末，生命星球的概念才在西方科学中找到了最流行和最持久的表达方式之一——盖亚假说。

Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”

盖亚假说由英国科学家兼发明家詹姆斯·洛夫洛克于 20 世纪 60 年代提出，后来与美国生物学家林恩·马古利斯共同发展。盖亚假说提出，地球上所有的生命和无生命元素都是“一个巨大生命体的一部分和伙伴，这个生命体整体有能力维持我们的星球成为适合生命生存的舒适栖息地。”

Lovelock published his first book on Gaia in 1979 amid a growing environmental movement.

1979 年，随着环保运动的兴起，洛夫洛克出版了他的第一本关于盖亚的书。

Although his ideas found an enthusiastic audience among the public, many scientists criticized and ridiculed them.

尽管他的想法受到了公众的热烈欢迎，但许多科学家却批评和嘲笑他的想法。

Those who bristled at the notion typically made the same protestations: Earth cannot be alive because it does not eat, grow, reproduce or evolve through natural selection like “real” living things.

那些对这个概念感到愤怒的人通常会提出同样的抗议：地球不可能有生命，因为它不像“真正的”生物那样通过自然选择进食、生长、繁殖或进化。

Yet there has never been an objective measure or a universally accepted definition of life.

然而，从来没有一个客观的衡量标准或普遍接受的生命定义。

There are numerous examples of things we con­sider inanimate that have traits of the living and vice versa.

有很多我们认为无生命的事物具有生命特征的例子，反之亦然。

Life is more spectral than categorical, more verb than noun.

生活更多的是光谱性的，而不是分类性的，更多的是动词性的，而不是名词性的。

Life is not a distinct class of matter but rather a process — a performance.

生命不是一类独特的物质，而是一个过程——一种表演。

Life is something matter does .

生活是有事的。

Although sci­ence has not yet arrived at a fundamental explanation of the phenomenon we call life, many experts in the past century have favored a variation of the following: Life is a system that sustains itself.

尽管科学尚未对我们称之为生命的现象做出根本性的解释，但上个世纪的许多专家都赞成以下观点的变体：生命是一个能够自我维持的系统。

This defining capacity for active self-preservation and self-regulation emerges at many different scales: at the scale of the cell, the organism, the ecosystem and, I would argue, the planet.

这种主动自我保护和自我调节的决定性能力出现在许多不同的尺度上：在细胞、有机体、生态系统以及我认为是地球的尺度上。

Gaia still retains something of a stigma in mainstream science, but in recent decades opposition has waned significantly .

盖亚在主流科学中仍然保留着某种耻辱，但近几十年来，反对意见已大大减弱。

Although the claim that Earth itself is a living entity remains contro­versial, some scientists embrace it , and others are increasingly open to it.

尽管地球本身是一个生命体的说法仍然存在争议，但一些科学家接受它，而另一些科学家则对此越来越持开放态度。

The idea that life transforms the planet and is intertwined with its self-regulatory processes has become a central tenet of mainstream Earth-system science, a relatively young field that explicitly studies the living and nonliving components of the planet as an integrated whole.

生命改变了地球并与其自我调节过程交织在一起的想法已经成为主流地球系统科学的核心原则，这是一个相对年轻的领域，明确地将地球上的生命和非生命组成部分作为一个整体进行研究。

As the Earth-system scientist Tim Lenton has written, he and his colleagues “now think in terms of the coupled evolution of life and the planet, recognizing that the evolution of life has shaped the planet, changes in the planetary environment have shaped life, and together they can be viewed as one process.”

正如地球系统科学家蒂姆·伦顿（Tim Lenton）所写，他和他的同事“现在从生命与地球的耦合进化角度进行思考，认识到生命的进化塑造了地球，行星环境的变化塑造了生命，它们可以被视为一个过程。”

Like many living things, Earth absorbs, stores and transforms en­ergy.

像许多生物一样，地球吸收、储存和转化能量。

Earth has a body with organized structures, membranes and daily rhythms.

地球有一个具有组织结构、膜和日常节奏的身体。

From the raw elements of our planet have emerged zillions of biological entities that ceaselessly devour, transfigure and replenish its rock, water and air.

从我们星球的原始元素中诞生了无数的生物实体，它们不断地吞噬、改变和补充地球的岩石、水和空气。

Such organisms do not simply reside on Earth; they are literal extensions of Earth.

这些生物体不仅仅存在于地球上；它们还存在于地球上。它们实际上是地球的延伸。

Moreover, organisms and their en­vironments are inextricably bonded in reciprocal evolution, often converging upon self-stabilizing processes that favor mutual persis­tence.

此外，生物体及其环境在相互进化中有着千丝万缕的联系，通常会趋向于有利于相互持久的自我稳定过程。

Collectively, these processes endow Earth with a kind of plan­etary physiology: with breath , metabolism, a regulated temperature and a balanced chemistry.

总的来说，这些过程赋予地球一种行星生理学：呼吸、新陈代谢、调节的温度和平衡的化学物质。

Earth is not a single organism or a product of standard Darwinian evolution, but it is nonetheless a genuine living entity, a vast interconnected living system.

地球不是一个单一的有机体，也不是标准达尔文进化论的产物，但它仍然是一个真正的生物体，一个巨大的相互关联的生命系统。

One early metaphor Lovelock deployed to explain Gaia was a redwood tree.

洛夫洛克用来解释盖亚的早期隐喻是一棵红杉树。

Only a few parts of a tree contain living cells, namely the leaves and thin layers of tissue within the trunk, branches and roots.

树木中只有少数部分含有活细胞，即树叶以及树干、树枝和根部内的薄层组织。

The rest is dead wood.

其余的都是枯木。

Similarly, the bulk of our planet is inanimate rock, wrapped in a flowering skin of life.

同样，我们星球的大部分都是无生命的岩石，包裹着生命的花朵。

Just as strips of living tissue are essential to keep a whole tree alive, Earth’s living skin helps sustain a kind of global being.

正如活组织条对于保持整棵树的生命至关重要一样，地球的活皮肤有助于维持一种全球存在。

What Lovelock did not realize at the time, however, was that even Earth’s seemingly inert skeleton of rock was far more porous and alive than most people believed.

然而，洛夫洛克当时没有意识到，即使是地球看似惰性的岩石骨架，也比大多数人想象的要多孔得多、更有活力。

For hundreds of years, Lechuguilla Cave appeared to be little more than a long hole leading to dead-end passages in the Guadalupe Moun­tains of New Mexico.

数百年来，Lechuguilla 洞穴看起来只不过是一个通向新墨西哥州瓜达卢佩山脉死胡同的长洞。

Prospectors visited to collect bat guano, which was prized as a fertilizer.

探矿者前来收集蝙蝠粪便，这种粪便被视为肥料。

Otherwise, no one paid it much attention.

否则，没有人太关注。

One day in the 1950s, however, cavers noticed wind streaming through rubble at the cave’s bottom, suggesting a hidden section.

然而，20 世纪 50 年代的一天，探洞者注意到风从洞穴底部的碎石中吹过，这表明有一个隐藏的区域。

A series of excavations beginning in the 1980s uncovered several long passageways.

20 世纪 80 年代开始的一系列挖掘工作发现了几条长通道。

Subsequent explorations eventually revealed about 150 miles of underground terrain.

随后的勘探最终揭示了约 150 英里的地下地形。

The tunnels and chambers were decorated with strange and beautiful formations: massive chandeliers of frostlike gyp­sum, lemon-yellow sulfur pods, pearly balloons of hydromagnesite, transparent selenite spears and calcite lily pads hovering over turquoise pools.

隧道和房间装饰着奇怪而美丽的结构：巨大的霜状石膏枝形吊灯、柠檬黄色的硫磺荚、水菱镁矿的珍珠气球、透明的亚硒酸盐矛和盘旋在绿松石池上的方解石睡莲。

In the early 1990s, the astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist Penelope Boston watched a National Geographic TV special about Lechuguilla.

20 世纪 90 年代初，天体生物学家和地球微生物学家 Penelope Boston 观看了有关 Lechuguilla 的国家地理电视特别节目。

She was fascinated by the prospect of a pristine subterranean wonderland.

她对原始地下仙境的前景着迷。

One of the re­searchers featured on the show, Kim Cunningham, had found some preliminary evidence of microbial life in the cave.

节目中的一位研究人员金·坎宁安 (Kim Cunningham) 发现了洞穴中存在微生物生命的一些初步证据。

Boston, who was particularly interested in the possibility of life beyond Earth, saw Le­chuguilla as an analog for potential subsurface habitats on other plan­ets.

波士顿对地球以外生命的可能性特别感兴趣，他将 Lechuguilla 视为其他行星上潜在的地下栖息地的类比。

She called Cunningham and arranged to visit the cave with a team of scientists and cavers.

她打电话给坎宁安，并安排与一组科学家和探洞者一起参观该洞穴。

Boston and the other scientists, who did not have much caving ex­perience, practiced for a few hours on cliffs in Boulder, Colo.

波士顿和其他没有太多探洞经验的科学家在科罗拉多州博尔德的悬崖上练习了几个小时。

The brief training was nowhere near adequate.

短暂的培训还远远不够。

Lechuguilla is not a simple series of intercon­nected rooms that a person can walk through; it’s a tangle of crystal laby­rinths embedded in a tortuous maze of rock.

Lechuguilla 并不是一个人可以走过的一系列相互连接的简单房间。这是一个镶嵌在曲折的岩石迷宫中的水晶迷宫。

To navigate it, Boston and her colleagues had to rappel down steep cliffs, climb over slippery towers of gypsum, traverse narrow ledges and squirm through stone honeycombs, all while towing their cumbersome gear.

为了在其中航行，波士顿和她的同事们必须从陡峭的悬崖上垂下来，爬过光滑的石膏塔，穿过狭窄的壁架，在石蜂窝中蠕动，同时拖着笨重的装备。

“We were in such an alien environment that we were just basically coping,” Boston recalls.

“我们处在一个如此陌生的环境中，我们基本上只能应付，”波士顿回忆道。

“I kept thinking to myself, I just have to live long enough to get out of here.”

“我一直在想，我必须活得足够长才能离开这里。”

They did survive, but not without injuries.

他们确实活了下来，但并非没有受伤。

At one point, Boston sprained her ankle and gouged her shin.

有一次，波士顿扭伤了脚踝并挖伤了小腿。

Her most revealing malady emerged not long before leaving the cave.

她最暴露的病症在离开洞穴前不久就出现了。

As she prepared to scrape some curious rust-colored fluff from a portion of the ceiling into a bag, a smidgen fell into her eye, which soon swelled shut as though it were infected.

当她准备把一些奇怪的铁锈色绒毛从天花板的一部分刮到袋子里时，一点点掉进了她的眼睛，很快就肿了起来，好像被感染了一样。

Perhaps, she thought, the brown fuzz was made by microbes; perhaps it was microbes.

她想，也许棕色的绒毛是微生物造成的；也许是微生物。

Laboratory studies eventually confirmed her hunch: the cave was cov­ered in micro-organisms that chewed through rock, chemically transforming iron and manganese for energy and leaving behind a soft mineral residue.

实验室研究最终证实了她的预感：洞穴里覆盖着微生物，它们咀嚼岩石，将铁和锰化学转化为能量，并留下柔软的矿物残留物。

Mi­crobes were turning rock into soil more than one thousand feet under­ground.

微生物正在将地下一千多英尺处的岩石变成土壤。

Eventually, through many years of research, Boston and other scientists revealed that the microbes in Lechuguilla do much more than spit out a little dirt.

最终，通过多年的研究，波士顿和其他科学家发现，Lechuguilla 中的微生物的作用远不止吐出一点污垢。

Lechuguilla is ensconced in thick layers of limestone, the petrified remains of a 250-million-year-old reef.

Lechuguilla 隐藏在厚厚的石灰岩层中，这是 2.5 亿年前珊瑚礁的石化遗迹。

The manifold chambers in such caves are usually formed by rainwater that seeps into the ground and gradually dissolves the limestone.

此类洞穴中的分流室通常是由雨水渗入地下并逐渐溶解石灰岩而形成的。

In Lechu­guilla, however, microbes are also the sculptors: Bacteria eating buried re­serves of oil release hydrogen-sulfide gas, which reacts with oxygen in groundwater, producing sulfuric acid that carves away limestone.

然而，在Lechuguilla，微生物也是雕刻家：细菌吃掉埋藏的石油储备，释放出硫化氢气体，该气体与地下水中的氧气发生反应，产生硫酸，从而雕刻出石灰石。

In parallel, different microbes consume hydrogen sulfide and generate sul­furic acid as a byproduct.

同时，不同的微生物消耗硫化氢并产生副产品硫酸。

Similar processes happen in 5 to 10 percent of limestone caverns globally.

全球 5% 到 10% 的石灰岩洞穴中都发生着类似的过程。

Since Boston’s initial descent into Lechuguilla, scientists around the world have discovered that micro-organisms transform the planet’s crust wherever they inhabit it.

自从波士顿首次降落到 Lechuguilla 以来，世界各地的科学家发现微生物无论居住在何处都会改变地壳。

Alexis Templeton, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, regularly visits a barren mountain valley in Oman where tec­tonic activity has pushed sections of the earth’s mantle — the layer that sits below the crust — much closer to the surface.

科罗拉多大学博尔德分校的地球微生物学家亚历克西斯·坦普尔顿（Alexis Templeton）定期访问阿曼的一个贫瘠山谷，那里的构造活动使地幔（位于地壳下方的层）的部分距离地表更近。

She and her col­leagues drill boreholes up to a quarter of a mile into the uplifted man­tle and extract long cylinders of 80-million-year-old rock, some of which are beautifully marbled in striking shades of maroon and green.

她和她的同事们在隆起的地幔中钻了四分之一英里的钻孔，并提取了具有 8000 万年历史的长圆柱体岩石，其中一些岩石上有美丽的大理石花纹，呈现出引人注目的栗色和绿色色调。

In laboratory studies, Templeton has demonstrated that these samples are full of bacteria, some of which change the composition of Earth’s crust: They eat hydrogen and breathe sulfates in the rock, exhale hydrogen sulfide and create new deposits of sulfide minerals similar to pyrite, also known as fool’s gold.

在实验室研究中，坦普尔顿证明这些样本中充满了细菌，其中一些细菌改变了地壳的成分：它们吃氢并呼吸岩石中的硫酸盐，呼出硫化氢并形成新的硫化物矿物沉积物，类似于黄铁矿，也称为愚人金。

Through related processes, microbes have helped form some of Earth’s stores of gold, silver, iron, copper, lead and zinc, among other metals.

通过相关过程，微生物帮助形成了地球上一些金、银、铁、铜、铅和锌等金属的储存。

As subsurface microbes break down rock, they often free the metals stuck within it.

当地下微生物分解岩石时，它们通常会释放出卡在其中的金属。

Some of the chemicals microbes release, such as hydrogen sulfide, combine with free-floating metals, forming new solid compounds.

微生物释放的一些化学物质（例如硫化氢）与自由漂浮的金属结合，形成新的固体化合物。

Other molecules produced by microbes grab soluble metals and bind them together.

微生物产生的其他分子会抓住可溶性金属并将它们结合在一起。

Some microbes stockpile metal inside their cells or grow a crust of microscopic metal flakes that con­tinuously attract even more metal, potentially forming a substantial deposit over long periods of time.

一些微生物在细胞内储存金属，或生长出一层微观金属薄片外壳，不断吸引更多金属，可能在很长一段时间内形成大量沉积物。

Life, in particular microbial life, has forged a large quantity of Earth’s minerals, which are naturally occurring inorganic solid com­pounds with highly organized atomic structures, or, to put it more plainly, very elegant rocks.

生命，特别是微生物生命，锻造了地球上大量的矿物质，这些矿物质是天然存在的、原子结构高度有序的无机固体化合物，或者说得更直白一些，是非常优雅的岩石。

Today Earth has more than 6,000 distinct mineral species, most of which are crystals such as diamond, quartz and graphite.

如今，地球上有超过 6,000 种不同的矿物，其中大部分是晶体，如钻石、石英和石墨。

In its infancy, however, Earth did not have much mineral diversity.

然而，在其初期，地球并没有太多的矿物多样性。

Over time, the continuous crumbling, melting and resolidifying of the planet’s early crust shifted and concentrated uncommon elements.

随着时间的推移，地球早期地壳的不断破碎、融化和重新凝固，导致了不常见元素的转移和浓缩。

Life began to break apart rock and recycle elements, generating entirely new chemical processes of miner­alization.

生命开始分解岩石并回收元素，产生全新的矿化化学过程。

More than half of all minerals on the planet can occur only in a high-oxygen environment, which did not exist before microbes, algae and plants oxygenated the ocean and atmosphere.

地球上一半以上的矿物质只能在高氧环境中出现，而在微生物、藻类和植物为海洋和大气提供氧气之前，这种环境是不存在的。

Through the combination of tectonic activity and the ceaseless bus­tle of life, Earth developed a mineral repertoire unmatched by any other known planetary body.

通过构造活动和永无休止的生命活动的结合，地球开发出了任何其他已知行星体都无法比拟的矿物库。

Comparatively, the moon, Mercury and Mars are minerally impoverished, with perhaps a few hundred mineral species among them at most.

相比之下，月球、水星和火星的矿产资源贫乏，最多可能有几百种矿物。

The variety of minerals on Earth depends not merely on the existence of life but also on its idio­syncrasies.

地球上矿物质的多样性不仅取决于生命的存在，还取决于其特性。

Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist at Carnegie Science, and the statistician Grethe Hystad have calculated that the chance of two planets having an identical set of mineral species is one in 10³²².

卡内基科学研究所的矿物学家和天体生物学家罗伯特·哈森 (Robert Hazen) 和统计学家格雷特·海斯塔德 (Grethe Hystad) 计算出，两颗行星拥有相同矿物种类的几率为十分之一。

Given that there are only an estimated 10²⁵ Earthlike planets in the cosmos, there is almost certainly no other planet with Earth’s exact comple­ment of minerals.

鉴于宇宙中估计只有 1025 个类地行星，几乎可以肯定没有其他行星拥有与地球完全相同的矿物质。

“The realization that Earth’s mineral evolution de­pends so directly on biological evolution is somewhat shocking,” Hazen writes in his book “Symphony in C.” “It represents a fundamental shift from the viewpoint of a few decades ago, when my mineralogy Ph.D. adviser told me: ‘Don’t take a biology course.

“认识到地球的矿物进化如此直接地依赖于生物进化，这有点令人震惊，”哈森在他的书《C 语言交响曲》中写道。 “与几十年前的观点相比，这代表了根本性的转变，当时我的矿物学博士导师告诉我：‘不要选生物学课程。

You’ll never use it!’ ”

你永远不会使用它！’”

The continents themselves may also be partial constructs of micro­bial terraforming.

大陆本身也可能是微生物改造的部分构造。

No one knows precisely how the continents were born, but a widely supported theory proposes that continental crust is a distillation of oceanic crust.

没有人确切知道大陆是如何诞生的，但一种得到广泛支持的理论认为大陆地壳是海洋地壳的蒸馏物。

The continents are made of granite, which, as far as we know, is abundant only on Earth; it has rarely been found in substantial quantities anywhere else in the known universe.

大陆由花岗岩构成，据我们所知，花岗岩仅在地球上含量丰富。在已知宇宙的其他地方很少发现大量的它。

In contrast, oceanic crust is composed of basalt, a cosmically common rock.

相比之下，洋壳由玄武岩组成，玄武岩是一种宇宙中常见的岩石。

Basalt is dark, dense and rich in magnesium and iron, a particularly heavy metal.

玄武岩呈黑色、致密且富含镁和铁（一种特别重的金属）。

More than three billion years ago, as Earth’s earliest ocean crust aged and cooled, it eventually became heavier than the mantle on which it floated and started to sink, a process called subduction.

三十亿多年前，随着地球最早的洋壳老化和冷却，它最终变得比它漂浮的地幔更重并开始下沉，这一过程称为俯冲。

During its descent into the mantle, ocean crust and its overlying sedimentary layer released the water trapped within them, which lowered the melting point of the surrounding mantle.

在下降到地幔的过程中，洋壳及其上覆的沉积层释放了困在其中的水，从而降低了周围地幔的熔点。

Certain components of the mantle began to melt into buoyant magma, which eventually erupted from volcanoes and cooled into new rock.

地幔的某些成分开始融化成有浮力的岩浆，最终从火山喷发并冷却成新的岩石。

This process continues today.

这个过程今天仍在继续。

In Earth’s earliest chapters, however, the mantle was significantly hotter than it is now; in addition to squeezing water out of sinking ocean crust, the mantle melted the crust itself.

然而，在地球最初的阶段，地幔的温度比现在要高得多。除了从下沉的洋壳中挤出水之外，地幔还熔化了地壳本身。

When this hybrid magma rose to the surface, it cooled into a new kind of rock, granitoid rock, which was largely depleted of magnesium and iron and thus was much less dense than basalt.

当这种混合岩浆上升到地表时，它冷却成一种新型岩石，即花岗岩类岩石，这种岩石很大程度上缺乏镁和铁，因此密度比玄武岩低得多。

Over time, granitoid rock was subducted and recycled into true granite.

随着时间的推移，花岗岩类岩石被俯冲并回收成真正的花岗岩。

Be­cause granite was less dense than basalt, it accumulated on top of the ocean crust, forming thick patches of early continental crust that grad­ually breached the water’s surface.

由于花岗岩的密度低于玄武岩，因此它堆积在洋壳顶部，形成厚厚的早期大陆地壳斑块，并逐渐突破水面。

Later, with the emergence of plate tectonics, protocontinents coalesced into microcontinents and eventually formed immense tracts of land high above sea level.

后来，随着板块构造的出现，原大陆合并成微大陆，最终形成了大片高出海平面的陆地。

By about 2.5 billion years ago, nearly a third of the planet’s surface was land.

大约 25 亿年前，地球表面近三分之一是陆地。

Several Earth scientists, including Robert Hazen and his colleagues, have investigated the possibility that life helped create the continents by promoting the subduction of oceanic crust and sediments and their transformation into granite.

包括罗伯特·黑森（Robert Hazen）和他的同事在内的几位地球科学家研究了生命通过促进洋壳和沉积物俯冲并转化为花岗岩来帮助形成大陆的可能性。

The more water the crust and sediments contain, the more easily this process occurs.

地壳和沉积物中含有的水越多，这个过程就越容易发生。

When Earth was young, microbes inhabiting the ocean crust were likely dissolving the basalt with acids and enzymes in order to obtain energy and nutrients, producing wet clay minerals.

当地球年轻时，居住在洋壳中的微生物很可能用酸和酶溶解玄武岩，以获得能量和营养，产生湿粘土矿物。

By lubricating the crust with those wet byproducts, the microbes may have accelerated the dissolution of both mantle and crust and their eventual transfiguration into new land.

通过用这些潮湿的副产品润滑地壳，微生物可能加速了地幔和地壳的溶解，并最终转变为新的陆地。

The geophysicists Dennis Höning and Tilman Spohn have published similar ideas.

地球物理学家丹尼斯·霍宁（Dennis Höning）和蒂尔曼·斯波恩（Tilman Spohn）也发表了类似的想法。

They point out that water trapped in subducting sediments escapes first, whereas water in the crust is typically expelled at greater depths.

他们指出，俯冲沉积物中的水首先逸出，而地壳中的水通常在更深的地方被排出。

The thicker the sedimentary layer covering the crust, the more water makes it into the deep mantle, which ultimately enhances the production of granite.

覆盖地壳的沉积层越厚，进入地幔深处的水就越多，最终提高了花岗岩的产量。

In Earth’s earliest eons, micro-organisms and, later, fungi and plants dissolved and degraded rock at a rate much greater than what geological processes could accomplish on their own.

在地球最早的亿万年里，微生物以及后来的真菌和植物溶解和降解岩石的速度远远大于地质过程本身所能完成的速度。

In doing so, they would have increased the amount of sediment deposited in deep ocean trenches, thereby cloaking subducting plates of ocean crust in thicker protective layers, flushing more water into the mantle and ultimately contributing to the creation of new land.

通过这样做，他们会增加深海海沟中沉积的沉积物数量，从而将洋壳俯冲板块隐藏在更厚的保护层中，将更多的水冲入地幔，最终促成新陆地的形成。

Some com­puter models suggest that had life never evolved, the expansion of the continents would have been severely stunted, and the planet might have remained a water world flecked with islands: an Earth without much earth.

一些计算机模型表明，如果生命从未进化，大陆的扩张就会受到严重阻碍，地球可能仍然是一个布满岛屿的水世界：一个没有太多地球的地球。

To recognize that deep subsurface life not only exists but also is engaged in a continuous alchemy of earth — that it may have helped create the very land on which all terrestrial life depends — is to redefine the modern understanding of life’s influence on the planet.

认识到深层地下生命不仅存在，而且还参与了地球的持续炼金术——它可能帮助创造了所有陆地生命赖以生存的土地——这将重新定义对生命对地球影响的现代理解。

Yet even today, some scientists, especially in geology and related fields, continue to describe life as a relatively inconsequential layer of goo coating a vastly greater mass of inanimate rock.

然而，即使在今天，一些科学家，尤其是地质学和相关领域的科学家，仍然将生命描述为覆盖在大得多的无生命岩石上的相对无关紧要的一层粘液。

Such characterizations belie life’s true power.

这些特征掩盖了生命的真正力量。

Life significantly expands the surface area of the planet capable of absorbing energy, exchanging gases and performing complex chemical reactions.

生命显着扩大了地球的表面积，使其能够吸收能量、交换气体和进行复杂的化学反应。

The Earth-sys­tem scientist Tyler Volk has calculated that all the plant roots on Earth, finely furred with tiny absorptive hairs, make up a surface area 35 times greater than the entire surface of our planet.

地球系统科学家泰勒·沃尔克（Tyler Volk）计算出，地球上所有植物的根部都长满细小的吸收性毛发，其表面积比地球整个表面大 35 倍。

Microbes are collectively equivalent to 200 Earth areas.

微生物的总面积相当于200个地球面积。

And if there were a layer of fertile soil three feet thick spread across the continents, all the tiny particles within it would have a combined surface area more than 100,000 times that of the bare planet.

如果有一层三英尺厚的肥沃土壤遍布整个大陆，那么其中所有微小颗粒的总表面积将超过裸露星球的 100,000 倍。

There’s simply no comparison between an Earth without life and Earth as we know it.

没有生命的地球和我们所知的地球根本无法比较。

Life’s ubiquity endows our planet with an anatomy and physiology.

生命的无处不在赋予我们的星球以解剖学和生理学的特征。

Together, Earth and life form a single, self-regulating system, one that has endured and evolved for more than four billion years.

地球和生命共同构成了一个单一的、自我调节的系统，这个系统已经持续和进化了超过四十亿年。

We have as much reason to regard our planet as a living entity as we do ourselves: a truth no longer substantiated by intuition alone, or by one man’s vi­sion, but by a preponderance of scientific evidence.

我们有充分的理由将我们的星球视为一个生命实体，就像我们自己一样：这一真理不再仅由直觉或个人的愿景所证实，而是由大量的科学证据所证实。

When we learn to see our species as part of a much larger life form — as members of a planetary ensemble — our responsibility to Earth becomes clearer than ever.

当我们学会将我们的物种视为更大生命形式的一部分——作为行星整体的成员时——我们对地球的责任变得比以往任何时候都更加清晰。

Fossil fuels, industrial agriculture and widespread pollution have not simply raised global temperature or “harmed the environment”; they have severely im­balanced the largest known living entity, hurling it into crisis.

化石燃料、工业化农业和广泛的污染不仅导致全球气温升高或“损害环境”；它们严重破坏了已知最大的生物体的平衡，使其陷入危机。

The speed and magnitude of this crisis are so great that, without the necessary interventions, Earth will require anywhere from thousands to mil­lions of years to fully recover on its own.

这场危机的速度和规模是如此之大，以至于如果没有必要的干预，地球将需要数千到数百万年的时间才能完全恢复。

In the process, it will become a world unlike any we have experienced, one potentially incapable of supporting modern human civilization and the ecosystems on which we currently depend.

在此过程中，它将成为一个不同于我们所经历过的世界，一个可能无法支持现代人类文明和我们目前所依赖的生态系统的世界。

For more than two centuries, Western science has re­garded the origin of life as something that happened on or in Earth, as if the planet were simply the setting for a singular phenomenon, the manger that housed a miracle.

两个多世纪以来，西方科学一直将生命的起源视为发生在地球上或地球内的事情，就好像地球只是一个奇异现象的背景，一个蕴藏着奇迹的马槽。

But the two cannot be separated in this way.

但两者不能就这样分开。

Life does not merely reside on the planet; it is an extension of the planet.

生命不仅仅存在于地球上，也存在于地球上。它是地球的延伸。

Life emerged from, is made of and returns to Earth.

生命源自地球、由地球构成并返回地球。

Earth is not simply a terrestrial planet with a bit of life on its surface; it’s a planet that came to life.

地球不仅仅是一颗表面有生命的类地行星；这是一个诞生的星球。

Earth is a rock that broiled, gushed and bloomed: the flowering callus of a half-sealed Vesuvius suspended in a bubble of breath.

地球是一块炙热、喷涌、绽放的岩石：半封闭的维苏威火山的开花愈伤组织悬浮在呼吸的气泡中。

Earth is a stone that eats starlight and radiates song, whirling through the inscrutable emptiness of space — pulsing, breathing, evolving — and just as vulnerable to death as we are.

地球是一块吞噬星光、发出歌声的石头，在深不可测的空虚太空中旋转——脉动、呼吸、进化——并且和我们一样容易受到死亡的伤害。

What Alice Munro Knew: The Nobel-winning author’s husband was a pedophile who targeted her daughter and other children.

艾丽丝·门罗所知：这位诺贝尔奖获得者作家的丈夫是一名恋童癖者，专门针对她的女儿和其他孩子。

Why did she stay silent?

她为什么保持沉默？

Christianity in the Classroom : A tiny school in Oklahoma could break down the wall between church and state.

课堂上的基督教：俄克拉荷马州的一所小学校可以打破教会和国家之间的墙。

Here’s how .

方法如下。

RecoveryTown, U.S.A.: The opioid epidemic ravaged Louisa, Ky.

美国康复镇：阿片类药物流行病肆虐肯塔基州路易莎。

Then rehab became the main source of economic opportunity .

然后康复成为经济机会的主要来源。

Rick Steves on ‘The Interview’ : The guidebook writer and TV personality reflected on his cancer diagnosis, social media’s corrosive effect on tourism and the transformative power of travel .

里克·史蒂夫斯（Rick Steves）谈《采访》：这位旅游指南作家兼电视名人反思了他的癌症诊断、社交媒体对旅游业的腐蚀作用以及旅行的变革力量。

The Last of the Highbrow Superstars?

最后的高雅超级巨星？

: Fifty years since he left the Soviet Union, the dancer and actor Mikhail Baryshnikov insists on using his huge fame to bring attention to difficult, esoteric art .

：离开苏联五十年后，舞蹈家兼演员米哈伊尔·巴里什尼科夫 (Mikhail Baryshnikov) 坚持利用他巨大的名气来引起人们对深奥艺术的关注。