【英翻】《大西洋月刊》：遇见地底生物

Meet the Endoterrestrials

遇见地底生物

  
They live thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. They eat hydrogen and exhale methane. And they may shape our world more profoundly than we can imagine.

它们生活在地表数千英尺以下的地方。它们吃着氢气，吐出甲烷。它们可能正以比我们想象的到更深的程度塑造着我们的世界。

Alexis Templeton remembers January 12, 2014, as the day the water exploded. A sturdy Pyrex bottle, sealed tight and filled with water, burst like a balloon.

亚历克西斯·坦普尔顿还记得2014年1月12日海水炸开的那一天。一个密封严密、里面灌满了水的结实的耐热瓶，就像气球一样爆裂了。

Templeton had just guided her Land Cruiser across the bumpy, rock-strewn floor of Wadi Lawayni, a broad, arid valley that cuts through the mountains of Oman. She parked beside a concrete platform that rose from the ground, marking a recently drilled water well. Templeton uncapped the well and lowered a bottle into its murky depths, hoping to collect a sample of water from 850 feet below the surface.

坦普尔顿刚刚驾驶着她的陆地巡洋舰穿过瓦迪·拉瓦尼崎岖不平、布满岩石的地面。瓦迪·拉瓦尼是横穿阿曼山脉的一条宽阔而干旱的山谷。她把车停在一个混凝土平台旁边，这个平台从地面升起，标志着这里有一口新钻的水井。坦普尔顿打开了井盖，把一个瓶子放进黑暗的深处，希望能从地下850英尺处收集到水的样本。

Wadi Lawayni is enclosed by pinnacles of chocolate-brown rock, hard as ceramic yet rounded and sagging like ancient mud-brick ruins. This fragment of the Earth’s interior, roughly the size of West Virginia, was thrust to the surface through an accident of plate tectonics millions of years ago. These exotic rocks—an anomaly on Earth—had lured Templeton to Oman.

瓦迪·拉瓦尼被像陶瓷一样坚硬，但又像古老的泥砖废墟一样圆润下垂的巧克力色岩石的尖顶包围着。这块地球内部的碎片大约有西弗吉尼亚那么大，是在几百万年前的一次板块构造事故中被冲到地表的。这些奇异的岩石——地球上的异类——吸引着坦普尔顿来到了阿曼。

Shortly after she hoisted her sample from the well, the bottle ruptured from internal pressure. The water gushed out through the cracks, fizzing like soda. The gas erupting from it was not carbon dioxide, as it is in soft drinks, but hydrogen—a flammable gas.

她刚把样品从井里提出来，瓶子就因内部压力而破裂了。水从裂缝里喷了出来，像苏打水一样嘶嘶作响。从中喷发出来的气体不是二氧化碳，而是一种可燃气体——氢气。

Templeton is a geobiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and to her, the gas has special significance: “Organisms love hydrogen,” she says. They love to eat it, that is. The hydrogen in the sample was not, itself, evidence of life. But it suggested that the rocks beneath the surface might be the sort of place where life can flourish.

坦普尔顿是位于博尔德的科罗拉多大学的一位地球生物学家，对她来说，这种气体有着特殊的意义：“生物喜欢氢，”她说道。它们喜欢吃它，就是这样。样品中的氢气本身并不是生命存在的证据。但它表明，地表下的岩石可能是生命得以繁衍的地方。

Templeton is one of a growing number of scientists who believe that the Earth’s deep subsurface is brimming with life. By some estimates, this unexplored biosphere may contain anywhere from a tenth to one-half of all living matter on Earth.

越来越多的科学家相信地球的深层地下充满了生命，坦普尔顿就是其中之一。据估计，这个尚未开发的生物圈可能包含了地球上十分之一到二分之一的生物。

Scientists have found microbes living in granite rocks 6,000 feet underground in the Rocky Mountains, and in seafloor sediment buried since the age of the dinosaurs. They have even found tiny animals—worms, shrimp-like arthropods, whiskered rotifers—among the gold deposits of South Africa, 11,000 feet below the surface.

科学家在落基山脉地下6000英尺的花岗岩中发现了微生物，在恐龙时代以来埋藏的海底沉积物中也发现了微生物。他们甚至在南非地下11000英尺的金矿中发现了微小的动物——蠕虫、虾状节肢动物、须轮虫。

We humans tend to see the world as a solid rock coated with a thin layer of life. But to scientists like Templeton, the planet looks more like a wheel of cheese, one whose thick, leathery rind is perpetually gnawed and fermented by the microbes that inhabit its innards. Those creatures draw nourishment from sources that sound not only inedible, but also intangible: the atomic decay of radioactive elements, the pressure-cooking of rocks as they sink and melt into the Earth’s deep interior—and perhaps even earthquakes.

我们人类倾向于把世界看作一块覆盖着一层薄薄的生命的坚硬的岩石。但对像坦普尔顿这样的科学家来说，这个星球更像是一个奶酪轮子，它厚实的皮革外皮不断被居住在其内部的微生物啃咬和发酵。这些生物的营养来源不仅听起来是不可食用的，而且是无形的：放射性元素的原子衰变，岩石下沉并融化到地球内部深处时产生的压力——甚至还有地震。

Templeton had come to Oman in search of a hidden oasis of life. That fizz of hydrogen gas in 2014 was a strong sign that she was onto something. So this past January, she and her colleagues returned, intent on drilling 1,300 feet into these rocks and finding out what lived there.

坦普尔顿来到阿曼是为了寻找一个隐蔽的生命绿洲。2014年氢气的嘶嘶声是一个强烈的信号，表明她在做什么。所以今年1月，她和她的同事们回来了，打算在这些岩石上钻上1300英尺，看看那里到底生活着什么。

On a hot winter afternoon, a guttural roar reverberated across the sun-drenched expanse of Wadi Lawayni. A bulldozer sat near the center of the valley. Mounted on its front was a towering drill shaft, spinning several times per second.

在一个炎热的冬日午后，一种喉咙咆哮的声音回荡在阳光普照的瓦迪·拉瓦尼广阔的土地上。一辆推土机停在山谷中心附近。安装在它前面的是一个高耸的钻杆，每秒能够旋转好几次。

Half a dozen men in hard hats, most of them Indian workers employed by a local company, operated the drill. Templeton and a half-dozen other scientists and graduate students congregated a few yards away, beneath the shade of a canopy that billowed in the gentle breeze. They bent over tables, examining the sections of stone core being brought up by the workers every hour or so.

六名戴着安全帽的男子操作着这台钻机，其中大多数人是当地一家公司雇佣的印度工人。坦普尔顿和其他六名科学家和研究生则聚集在几码远的一个树冠下，树冠在微风中翻腾。他们伏在桌子前，每隔一小时左右就检查工人们搬运上来的岩芯。

The rig had been running for a day, and the cores coming out of the ground were changing color as the drill penetrated deeper into the earth. The top few feet of stone were tinted orange and yellow, indicating that oxygen from the surface had turned the iron in the rock into rusty minerals. By 60 feet below the surface, those fingerprints of oxygen petered out, and the stone darkened to greenish-gray, spider-webbed with black veins.

钻机已经运转了一天，随着钻机深入地下，从地下钻出的岩心开始变色。最上面几英尺的石头被染成了橙色和黄色，这表明地表的氧气把岩石中的铁变成了生锈的矿物。在地下60英尺的地方，氧气的痕迹逐渐消失，石头变成了青灰色，布满黑色的蜘蛛网纹理。

“This is beautiful rock,” said Templeton, running a latex-gloved finger over its surface. Her sunglasses were pushed back over her straight brown hair, revealing cheekbones darkened from years of working outside on ships, on tropical islands, in the high Arctic, and everywhere else her work has taken her. “I’m hoping we see a lot more of this,” she said.

“这是一块美丽的岩石，”坦普尔顿说着，用戴着乳胶手套的手指抚摸着岩石表面。她把墨镜往后推，盖在一头笔直的棕色头发上，露出了因多年在船上、热带岛屿上、北极地区工作而变黑的颧骨。“我希望我们能看到更多这样的情况，”她说道。

The green-black rock was giving her a close look at something that is all but impossible to observe just about anywhere else on the planet.

这块青黑色的岩石让她近距离观察到了地球上其他地方几乎不可能观察到的东西。

These rocks from deep inside the Earth are rich in iron—iron in the form of minerals that don’t ordinarily survive anywhere near the planet’s surface. This subterranean iron is so chemically reactive, so eager to combine with oxygen, that when it comes in contact with water underground, it rips the water molecules apart. It yanks out the oxygen—the “O” in H2O—and leaves behind H2, or hydrogen gas.

这些来自地球深处的岩石富含铁——以矿物的形式存在的铁通常在地球表面的任何地方都无法幸存下来。这种地下存在的铁具有很强的化学活性，它非常渴望与氧气结合，当它与地下的水接触时，就会把水分子撕裂。它拉扯出氧，留下H2，也就是氢气。

Geologists call this process “serpentinization,” for the sinuous veins of black, green, and white minerals that it leaves behind. Serpentinization usually happens only in places inaccessible to humans, such as thousands of feet beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

地质学家将这一过程称为“蛇纹石化”，因为它遗留下了黑色、绿色和白色矿物的蜿蜒矿脉。蛇纹石化通常只发生在人类无法到达的地方，比如大西洋海底之下数千英尺的地方。

Here in Oman, though, deep-earth rocks have been lifted so close to the surface that serpentinization occurs only a few hundred feet underground. The hydrogen gas that burst Templeton’s water bottle in 2014 was a tiny sample of serpentinization’s yield; one water well, drilled a few years ago in this same region, released so much hydrogen that it was judged an explosion risk—prompting the government to seal it shut with concrete.

然而，在阿曼这里，地层深处的岩石被抬升到离地表如此之近的地方，以至于蛇纹石化就发生在地下几百英尺的地方。2014年，坦普尔顿的水瓶爆裂时产生的氢气只是蛇形石化产物的一个小样本；几年前在同一地区钻探的一口水井释放了非常多的氢气，以至于被判定为有爆炸的危险——从而促使政府用混凝土将其封堵住。

Hydrogen is special stuff. It was one of the fuels that propelled the Apollo missions, and the space shuttles, into orbit; ounce for ounce, it is one of the most energy-dense naturally occurring compounds on Earth. This makes it an important food for microbes below Earth’s surface.

氢是一种特殊的物质。它是推动阿波罗计划和航天飞机进入轨道的燃料之一；它是地球上能量密度最大的天然化合物之一。这使得它成为地表以下微生物的重要食物。

All told, the microbes living beneath the mountains of eastern Oman may consume thousands of tons of hydrogen each year—resulting in a slow, controlled combustion of the gas, precisely choreographed by the enzymes inside their water-filled cells.

总而言之，生活在阿曼东部山脉下的微生物每年可能消耗数千吨氢气——从而导致了这种气体缓慢的、可控的燃烧，而这些燃烧过程是由它们充满水的细胞内的酶精确控制的。

But that hydrogen supplies only half the equation of life: To produce energy from hydrogen, microbes need something to burn it with, just as humans inhale oxygen to burn food. Figuring out what the microbes are “breathing” so far underground, beyond the reach of oxygen, is a key part of Templeton’s mission.

但这些氢气只提供了生命方程式的一半：要从氢中产生能量，微生物就需要一些东西来燃烧它，就像人类吸入氧气来燃烧食物一样。弄清楚这些微生物在地下氧气无法到达的地方呼吸着什么，是坦普尔顿计划中的关键部分。

At two in the afternoon, a battered pickup truck trundled past the drill site on a dusty dirt track. Behind it, six camels trotted in tight formation, their heads bobbing in the air: local livestock, tethered on short leashes, being led to a fresh patch of rangeland somewhere up the wadi.

下午两点，一辆破旧的小卡车在一条尘土飞扬的小道上驶过钻井现场。在它后面，六只骆驼排成紧密的队形小跑着，它们的头在空中上下摆动：当地的牲畜被拴在短皮带上，被带到溪边某处的一块草地上。

Templeton, oblivious to the camels, called out in excitement: “Gold!” She pointed to a section of core lying on the table, and to a dime-sized cluster of yellow metallic crystals. Their cubic shapes revealed her little joke: The crystals were not real gold, but fool’s gold, also known as pyrite.

坦普尔顿没有看见骆驼，她兴奋地喊道：“金子！”她指着桌子上的一段岩芯，还有一堆硬币大小的黄色金属晶体。它们的立方形状让她的小笑话露了馅：这些晶体不是真正的金子，而是傻瓜的金子，也叫黄铁矿。

Pyrite, composed of iron and sulfur, is one of dozens of minerals known to be “biogenic”: Its formation is sometimes triggered by microbes. The crystals coalesce from the waste products that microbial cells exhale. So these pyrite crystals could be a byproduct of microbe metabolism—a possibility Templeton calls “beautiful.”

黄铁矿是由铁和硫构成的，它是几十种已知的“生物成因”矿物之一：它的形成有时是由微生物触发的。这些晶体是由微生物细胞呼出的废物凝聚而成。所以这些黄铁矿晶体可能是微生物代谢的副产品——一种坦普尔顿称其为“美丽”的可能性。

Back home in Colorado, she’ll give these crystals the same careful attention that an archaeologist would devote to a Roman trash pile. She’ll cut them into transparent slices and view them under a microscope. If the pyrite is, in fact, the product of living cells, she says, then the microbes “might even be entombed in the minerals.” She hopes to find their fossilized bodies.

回到科罗拉多州的家中，她会像考古学家对待罗马的垃圾堆一样，对这些水晶给予细心的关注。她会把它们切成透明的薄片，放在显微镜下观察。她说，如果黄铁矿实际上是活细胞的产物，那么微生物“甚至可能就埋藏在矿物中”。她希望能找到它们的化石。

Not until the early 1990s did anyone suspect that abundant life might inhabit the deep earth. The first evidence came from the rocks that sit below the seafloor.

直到20世纪90年代初，才有人怀疑地球深处可能存在丰富的生命。第一个证据来自海底下的岩石。

Geologists had long noticed that volcanic glass, found in dark, basaltic rocks that lay hundreds to thousands of feet below the seafloor, was often riddled with microscopic pits and tunnels. “We had no idea that this might be biological,” says Hubert Staudigel, a volcanologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

地质学家早就注意到，在海床下数百至数千英尺深的玄武岩中发现的火山玻璃里，通常布满了微小的坑洞和隧道。加州拉荷亚市斯克里普斯海洋研究所火山学家休伯特·斯托迪格尔说:“我们当时还不知道这可能是生物学上的现象。”

In 1992, a young scientist named Ingunn Thorseth, of the University of Bergen in Norway, suggested that the pits were the geologic equivalent of tooth cavities: Microbes had etched them into the volcanic glass as they consumed atoms of iron. In fact, Thorseth found what appeared to be dead cells inside the cavities—in rock samples collected from 3,000 feet beneath the seafloor.

1992年，挪威卑尔根大学年轻的科学家因古恩·索塞斯提出，这些坑相当于地质上的蛀牙洞：微生物在吞噬铁原子时将它们蚀刻在了火山玻璃上。事实上，索赛斯在这些腔洞中发现了看似死亡的细胞——就是在海底3000英尺处采集的岩石样本中。

When these discoveries unfolded, Templeton had not yet entered the field. She finished a master’s degree in geochemistry in 1996, then took a job at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where she studied how quickly microbes were eating the jet fuel embedded in the soil of a former U.S. Navy base. A few years later, for her Ph.D. research at Stanford, she studied how underground microbes metabolize lead, arsenic, and other pollutants.

当这些被发现时，坦普尔顿还没有进入这个领域。1996年，她获得了地球化学硕士学位，之后在加州的劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室找到了一份工作。在那里，她对微生物吞噬埋藏在前美国海军基地土壤中的喷气燃料的速度进行了研究。几年后，在斯坦福攻读博士学位时，她研究了地下微生物是如何代谢铅、砷和其他污染物的。

In 2002, she moved to Scripps to work with Bradley Tebo, a biology professor, and Staudigel, on a related question: How were microbes living off the iron and other metals in basaltic glass from the seafloor?

2002年，她搬到斯克里普斯，与生物学教授布拉德利·泰博和斯塔迪格尔一起研究一个相关问题：微生物是如何以海底玄武玻璃中的铁和其他金属为生的？

In November of that year, on the back deck of a research ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, she climbed down the hatch of the Pisces-IV, a car-sized submersible, and was lowered into the sea. Terry Kerby, a pilot with the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory, guided the craft to the southern slope of Loihi Seamount, an undersea volcano near Hawaii’s Big Island.

那年11月，在太平洋中部的一艘考察船的后甲板上，她从一辆汽车大小的潜水器“双鱼座四号”的舱口爬了下来，沉入了大海。夏威夷海底研究实验室的操纵员特里·克尔比驾驶着这台潜水器前往夏威夷大岛附近的海底火山——罗伊希海底火山的南坡。

At a depth of 5,600 feet, the sub’s floodlights dimly illuminated a bizarre undersea landscape: a jumble of what resembled black, bulging trash bags, haphazardly stacked into towering pinnacles. These so-called pillow basalts had formed decades or centuries before as lava oozed from cracks, encountered seawater, and flash-cooled into lobes of glassy rock. Templeton lay on her side on a bench, bundled up against the cold, and watched through a thick glass portal as Kerby broke off pieces of basalt with the craft’s robotic pincer arms. Eight hours after they were lowered into the ocean, they returned to the surface with 10 pounds of rock.

在5600英尺深的水下，潜艇的泛光灯隐隐约约地照亮了一幅奇异的海底景观：一堆乱七八糟的东西，像是鼓鼓囊囊的黑色垃圾袋，杂乱地堆在高耸的塔尖上。这些所谓的枕状玄武岩形成于几十年前或几百年前，当时岩浆从裂缝中渗出，遇到海水，然后闪冷形成玻璃状的岩石裂片。坦普尔顿侧身躺在一条长凳上，裹得严严实实的，抵御着寒冷。她透过一个厚厚的玻璃窗，看着克尔比用飞船的机械钳子手臂掰下玄武岩碎片。他们被放如海底8小时后，带着10磅重的岩石回到了海面上。

The same year, she and Staudigel visited Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano, hoping to collect microbe-free volcanic glass that they could compare with their deep-sea samples. Clad in heavy boots, they walked onto an active lava flow, treading on a black crust of hardened rock just half an inch thick. Staudigel found a spot where the orange, molten lava had broken through the overlying crust. He scooped up the glowing material with a metal pole and plopped it—like hot, gooey honey—into a bucket of water. It hissed and crackled, boiling the water as it hardened into fresh glass.

同年，她和斯塔迪格尔造访了夏威夷的基拉韦厄火山，希望在那里收集到没有微生物存在的火山玻璃，以便与深海样品进行比较。他们穿着笨重的靴子，踏上活跃的熔岩流，踩在一块只有半英寸厚的坚硬岩石的黑色外壳上。斯塔迪格尔发现了橙色的熔岩从覆盖着的地壳中喷发出来的地方。他用一根金属棒把发光的材料舀起来，扑通一声扔进一桶水里。它嘶嘶作响，噼啪作响，把水烧开了，而它则硬化成新的玻璃。

Back in the lab, Templeton isolated dozens of the bacterial strains that leach iron and manganese out of the deep-sea rocks. She and her colleagues remelted the sterile glass from Kilauea in a furnace, doped it with different amounts of iron and other nutrients, and grew the bacterial strains from the seafloor on it. She used sophisticated X-ray techniques to watch, fascinated, as the bacteria digested the minerals.

回到实验室中，坦普尔顿从深海岩石中分离出了几十种从铁和锰中滤出的细菌。她和她的同事们将基拉韦厄火山的无菌玻璃放到熔炉中重熔，加入不同数量的铁和其他营养物质，并在其上培养来自海底的细菌。她用复杂的X光技术，着迷地观察细菌消化矿物质的过程。

“I have a basement full of basalt from the seafloor because I can’t let it go,” she told me one day during a break in the drilling.

“我有一个地下室，里面装满了来自海底的玄武岩，因为我放不下它，”有一天，在钻探间歇，她告诉了我这件事。

But those rocks, and the critters that chew on them, had one major drawback for Templeton: They came from the seafloor, where the water contains oxygen.

但是对坦普尔顿来说，这些岩石，还有那些啃噬它们的动物，有一个主要的缺点：它们来自海底，那里的水中含有氧气。

Oxygen sustains every animal on Earth, from aardvarks to earthworms to jellyfish; our atmosphere and most of our ocean is chock-full of it. But Earth has only been highly oxygenated for a tiny fraction of its history. Even today, vast swaths of our planet’s biosphere have never encountered oxygen. Go more than a few feet into bedrock, and it’s virtually nonexistent. Go anywhere else in the solar system, including places like Mars that might harbor life, and you won’t find it, either.

氧气支撑着地球上的每一种动物，从非洲食蚁兽到蚯蚓再到水母；我们的大气层和大部分海洋中都充满了这种气体。但是地球只有一小部分的历史是富氧的。即使在今天，我们地球的生物圈的大片区域也从未遇到过氧气。只要深入基岩几英尺，它就几乎不存在了。如果去往太阳系的其他地方，包括火星这样可能孕育生命的地方，你也找不到它的踪迹。

As Templeton explored Earth’s deep biosphere, she had become interested in how life originated on Earth—and where else it might exist in the solar system. The subsurface could provide a window into those distant places and times, but only if she could delve deeper, below the reach of oxygen.

当坦普尔顿探索地球深层的生物圈时，她对地球上的生命起源以及太阳系中其他地方的生命起源产生了兴趣。地底可以提供一扇窗户，让她看到那些遥远的地方和时代，但前提是她能在氧气触及不到的地方挖得更深。

The mountains of east Oman seemed like the perfect place. This massive slab of slowly serpentinizing rock preserves, in its interior, the oxygen-deprived conditions and chemically reactive iron minerals that are thought to exist deep inside the planet.

东阿曼的群山似乎是一个完美的地方。这一大块缓慢蛇纹石化的岩石在其内部保存了被认为存在于地球深处的缺氧条件和化学反应性铁矿物。

Templeton and several other deep-biosphere researchers connected with a major effort that was in early planning stages—the Oman Drilling Project.

坦普尔顿和其他几个深海生物圈的研究人员参与了一项处于早期计划阶段的重要工作——阿曼钻探项目。

The effort was co-led by Peter Kelemen, a geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. He had his own mission: The deep-earth rocks in Oman react not only with oxygen and water but also with carbon dioxide, pulling the gas out of the atmosphere and locking it into carbonate minerals—a process that, if understood, could help humanity offset some of its carbon emissions.

这项工作是由纽约拉蒙特-多尔蒂地球观测站的地质学家彼得·克莱门一同领导的。他有自己的使命：阿曼的深部岩石不仅与氧气和水发生反应，还与二氧化碳发生反应，将气体从大气中拉扯出来，锁入碳酸盐矿中——如果能理解这一过程，就能帮助人类抵消部分的碳排放。

Kelemen was present during the drilling at Wadi Lawayni in January 2018. And he was bullish on the prospects of finding life. These rocks had originally formed at a temperature of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. But they would have rapidly cooled, and today the top thousand feet of rock hover around 90 degrees Fahrenheit. These rocks, he said, “have not been hot enough to kill microbes since the Cretaceous”—the age of the dinosaurs.

2018年1月，克莱门就在瓦迪拉瓦尼钻井现场。他对找到生命的前景很乐观。这些岩石最初形成的温度超过1800华氏度。但是它们很快就会冷却下来，而今天，顶部的1000英尺岩石的温度在华氏90度左右徘徊。他说，这些岩石“自白垩纪(恐龙时代)以来还没有热到足以杀死微生物的程度”。

At three in the afternoon at the drill site, half a dozen team members gathered near the rig for what had become an hourly ritual: a moment of suspense.

下午三点，在钻井现场，六名队员聚集在了钻井平台附近，开始了一项每小时都进行一次的仪式：悬疑时刻。

A new section of core, freshly raised from the borehole, was lowered onto a sawhorse—a stone cylinder 10 feet long and as big around as the fat end of a baseball bat, concealed in a metal pipe.

一段刚从钻孔中挖出的岩芯被放入锯木机中，锯木机是一个石质圆柱体，长10英尺，和棒球棒的粗头一样大，并被隐藏在金属管中。

Workers lifted one end of the pipe. And out slid the core—along with a gush of black gunk. Glops of thick, dark sludge dripped on the ground. The core was covered from end to end.

工人们抬起了管子的一端。随着一股黑色粘稠物喷涌而出，岩芯滑了出来。一团又浓又黑的污泥滴在地上。岩芯从头到尾都被它包裹住了。

“Oh my god,” someone said. “Oya.” Murmurs all around.

“哦，我的上帝，呕”有人说道。周围的人都在窃窃私语。

A worker wiped down the core, and pinprick bubbles erupted on its smooth, sheeny surface—reminiscent of the bubbles in hot cooking oil. The stone, no longer pressurized underground, was degassing before our eyes, the bubbles squirting out through pores in the rock. The odor of sewer and burnt rubber rose into the air—a smell that had instant meaning for the scientists present.

一名工人擦干了堆芯，它光滑、光亮的表面上冒出了小气泡，让人想起热食用油里的气泡。石头不再在地下加压，而是在我们眼前冒气，气泡从岩石的孔隙中喷出。下水道的气味和烧焦的橡胶味散发到了空气中，这种气味对在场的科学家们来说立刻就有了意义。

“That rock is seriously alive,” said Templeton.

“那块岩石真的还有生物存在，”坦普尔顿说道。

“Hydrogen sulfide,” said Kelemen.

“硫化氢，”克莱门说道。