萬物簡史 第72期:敲石頭的人們(4)

It was while puzzling over these matters thatHutton had a series of exceptional insights. Fromlooking at his own farmland, he could see that soilwas created by the erosion of rocks and thatparticles of this soil were continually washed awayand carried off by streams and rivers and redepositedelsewhere. He realized that if such a process werecarried to its natural conclusion then Earth wouldeventually be worn quite smooth. Yet everywherearound him there were hills. Clearly there had to besome additional process, some form of renewaland uplift, that created new hills and mountains to keep the cycle going.

就是在考慮這些問題的過程中，赫頓提出了一系列不同凡響的見解。他朝自己的農田一看，只見巖石經過腐蝕變成了土壤，土壤粒子被溪水和河水沖刷，帶到別處沉積下來。他意識到，要是這個過程持續(xù)到地球的自然滅亡之時，那么地球最終會被磨得非常光滑。然而，他身邊到處是丘陵。顯而易見，肯定還有某種別的過程，某種形式的更新和隆起，創(chuàng)造了新的丘陵和新的大山，不停地如此循環(huán)。

The marine fossils on mountaintops, he decided, had not been deposited during floods, but hadrisen along with the mountains themselves. He also deduced that it was heat within the Earththat created new rocks and continents and thrust up mountain chains. It is not too much to saythat geologists wouldn't grasp the full implications of this thought for two hundred years, whenfinally they adopted plate tectonics. Above all, what Hutton's theories suggested was that Earthprocesses required huge amounts of time, far more than anyone had ever dreamed. There wereenough insights here to transform utterly our understanding of the Earth.

他認為，山頂上的海洋生物化石不是發(fā)洪水期間沉積的，而是跟大山本身一起隆起來的。他還推測，是地球內部的地熱創(chuàng)造了新的巖石和大陸，頂起了新的山脈。說得客氣一點，地質學家不愿意理解這種見解的全部含義，直到200年之后。這時候，他們終于采納了板塊構造論。赫頓的理論尤其提出，形成地球的過程需要很長時間，比任何人想像的還要長得多。這里面有好多深刻的見解，足以徹底改變我們對這顆行星的認識。