The Living Planet
The Living Planet
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生命星球
DOI：
10.1007/978-1-4614-8133-1_4
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发表时间：
2013
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Stevenson
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
D. Stevenson
2004年圣诞节后的第二天，节礼日清晨，一段近1000公里长的地壳在印度尼西亚海岸破裂。断裂的一侧弹升了15米，而另一侧沿着一条被称为巨型逆冲的断层滑向地球内部。在接踵而至的灾难中，印度洋周边国家有近30万人丧生。随之而来的9.2级地震是有记录以来最大的地震之一，它像钟声一样震动了地球。虽然这场地震是戏剧性的，但它远不是不寻常的，它只是地球图书馆一本书中的一小段话。节礼日的悲剧代表着地球表面某些部分的位置发生了微小的变化--这一过程被称为板块构造--可能是从我们的地壳凝固以来就开始运作的。
Early on the morning of Boxing Day, 2004, the day following Christmas, a portion of Earth’s crust nearly 1,000 km long broke off the coast of Indonesia. One side of the fracture bounced up 15 m while the other slipped down towards Earth’s interior along a fault known as a megathrust. Nearly 300,000 people lost their lives in countries spanning the circumference of the Indian Ocean in the calamity that followed. The accompanying 9.2 magnitude quake was one of the biggest ever recorded, and it shook the planet like a bell. Dramatic though this quake was, it was far from unusual and formed but a small paragraph in a single chapter of one book in the library of our planet. The Boxing Day tragedy represented a small shift in the positions of parts of the planet’s surface – a process, called plate tectonics – that may have operated since our planet’s crust solidified.