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Part IV Dangerous Planet
第四部 处境危险的行星
The history of any one part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.—British geologist Derek V. Ager
地球的任何一部分历史，犹如一个士兵的生活，由长期的无聊和短期的恐怖组成。——英国地质学家德雷克·V·埃基尔
13 Bang!
第十三章 砰！
People knew for a long time that there was something odd about the earth beneath Manson, Iowa. In 1912, a man drilling a well for the town water supply reported bringing up a lot of strangely deformed rock—"crystalline clast breccia with a melt matrix" and "overturned ejecta flap," as it was later described in an official report. The water was odd too. It was almost as soft as rainwater. Naturally occurring soft water had never been found in Iowa before.
人们很久以来就知道，艾奥瓦州曼森下面的泥土有点儿怪。1912年，有个为该镇寻找水源而打井的人报告说，他掘出来许多奇形怪状的岩石──后来在一份官方报告中是这样描述的：“熔化的脉石里混杂着晶状的角砾岩屑”，“喷出物的结盖翻了个身”。那些水也很怪，它几乎是雨水般的软水。天然的软水以前在艾奥瓦州从来没有发现过。
Though Manson's strange rocks and silken waters were matters of curiosity, forty-one years would pass before a team from the University of Iowa got around to making a trip to the community, then as now a town of about two thousand people in the northwest part of the state. In 1953, after sinking a series of experimental bores, university geologists agreed that the site was indeed anomalous and attributed the deformed rocks to some ancient, unspecified volcanic action. This was in keeping with the wisdom of the day, but it was also about as wrong as a geological conclusion can get.
虽然曼森的岩石很古怪，水很柔软，但直到41年以后艾奥瓦大学才派了一个小组来到那个社区。当时和现在一样，曼森只是该州西北部一个大约两万人口的小镇。1953年，打了一系列实验性的钻孔以后，该大学的地质学家一致认为，这地方确实有点反常，但把变了形的岩石归因于古代的一次火山活动。这与当时的认识是一致的，但作为一个地质结论，那就大错特错了。
