Meet the Endoterrestrials

遇見地底生物

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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.

它們生活在地表數(shù)千英尺以下的地方。它們吃著氫氣，吐出甲烷。它們可能正以比我們想象的到更深的程度塑造著我們的世界。

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.

亞歷克西斯·坦普爾頓還記得2014年1月12日海水炸開的那一天。一個密封嚴密、里面灌滿了水的結(jié)實的耐熱瓶，就像氣球一樣爆裂了。

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.

坦普爾頓剛剛駕駛著她的陸地巡洋艦穿過瓦迪·拉瓦尼崎嶇不平、布滿巖石的地面。瓦迪·拉瓦尼是橫穿阿曼山脈的一條寬闊而干旱的山谷。她把車停在一個混凝土平臺旁邊，這個平臺從地面升起，標志著這里有一口新鉆的水井。坦普爾頓打開了井蓋，把一個瓶子放進黑暗的深處，希望能從地下850英尺處收集到水的樣本。

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·拉瓦尼被像陶瓷一樣堅硬，但又像古老的泥磚廢墟一樣圓潤下垂的巧克力色巖石的尖頂包圍著。這塊地球內(nèi)部的碎片大約有西弗吉尼亞那么大，是在幾百萬年前的一次板塊構(gòu)造事故中被沖到地表的。這些奇異的巖石——地球上的異類——吸引著坦普爾頓來到了阿曼。

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.

她剛把樣品從井里提出來，瓶子就因內(nèi)部壓力而破裂了。水從裂縫里噴了出來，像蘇打水一樣嘶嘶作響。從中噴發(fā)出來的氣體不是二氧化碳，而是一種可燃氣體——氫氣。

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.

坦普爾頓是位于博爾德的科羅拉多大學的一位地球生物學家，對她來說，這種氣體有著特殊的意義：“生物喜歡氫，”她說道。它們喜歡吃它，就是這樣。樣品中的氫氣本身并不是生命存在的證據(jù)。但它表明，地表下的巖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.

越來越多的科學家相信地球的深層地下充滿了生命，坦普爾頓就是其中之一。據(jù)估計，這個尚未開發(fā)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.

科學家在落基山脈地下6000英尺的花崗巖中發(fā)現(xiàn)了微生物，在恐龍時代以來埋藏的海底沉積物中也發(fā)現(xiàn)了微生物。他們甚至在南非地下11000英尺的金礦中發(fā)現(xiàn)了微小的動物——蠕蟲、蝦狀節(jié)肢動物、須輪蟲。

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.

我們?nèi)祟悆A向于把世界看作一塊覆蓋著一層薄薄的生命的堅硬的巖石。但對像坦普爾頓這樣的科學家來說，這個星球更像是一個奶酪輪子，它厚實的皮革外皮不斷被居住在其內(nèi)部的微生物啃咬和發(fā)酵。這些生物的營養(yǎng)來源不僅聽起來是不可食用的，而且是無形的：放射性元素的原子衰變，巖石下沉并融化到地球內(nèi)部深處時產(chǎn)生的壓力——甚至還有地震。

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.

坦普爾頓來到阿曼是為了尋找一個隱蔽的生命綠洲。2014年氫氣的嘶嘶聲是一個強烈的信號，表明她在做什么。所以今年1月，她和她的同事們回來了，打算在這些巖石上鉆上1300英尺，看看那里到底生活著什么。

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.

在一個炎熱的冬日午后，一種喉嚨咆哮的聲音回蕩在陽光普照的瓦迪·拉瓦尼廣闊的土地上。一輛推土機停在山谷中心附近。安裝在它前面的是一個高聳的鉆桿，每秒能夠旋轉(zhuǎn)好幾次。

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.

六名戴著安全帽的男子操作著這臺鉆機，其中大多數(shù)人是當?shù)匾患夜竟蛡虻挠《裙と恕Ｌ蛊諣栴D和其他六名科學家和研究生則聚集在幾碼遠的一個樹冠下，樹冠在微風中翻騰。他們伏在桌子前，每隔一小時左右就檢查工人們搬運上來的巖芯。

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.

鉆機已經(jīng)運轉(zhuǎn)了一天，隨著鉆機深入地下，從地下鉆出的巖心開始變色。最上面幾英尺的石頭被染成了橙色和黃色，這表明地表的氧氣把巖石中的鐵變成了生銹的礦物。在地下60英尺的地方，氧氣的痕跡逐漸消失，石頭變成了青灰色，布滿黑色的蜘蛛網(wǎng)紋理。

“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.

“這是一塊美麗的巖石，”坦普爾頓說著，用戴著乳膠手套的手指撫摸著巖石表面。她把墨鏡往后推，蓋在一頭筆直的棕色頭發(fā)上，露出了因多年在船上、熱帶島嶼上、北極地區(qū)工作而變黑的顴骨?！拔蚁Ｍ覀兡芸吹礁噙@樣的情況，”她說道。

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.

這塊青黑色的巖石讓她近距離觀察到了地球上其他地方幾乎不可能觀察到的東西。

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.

這些來自地球深處的巖石富含鐵——以礦物的形式存在的鐵通常在地球表面的任何地方都無法幸存下來。這種地下存在的鐵具有很強的化學活性，它非?？释c氧氣結(jié)合，當它與地下的水接觸時，就會把水分子撕裂。它拉扯出氧，留下H2，也就是氫氣。

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.

地質(zhì)學家將這一過程稱為“蛇紋石化”，因為它遺留下了黑色、綠色和白色礦物的蜿蜒礦脈。蛇紋石化通常只發(fā)生在人類無法到達的地方，比如大西洋海底之下數(shù)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，在阿曼這里，地層深處的巖石被抬升到離地表如此之近的地方，以至于蛇紋石化就發(fā)生在地下幾百英尺的地方。2014年，坦普爾頓的水瓶爆裂時產(chǎn)生的氫氣只是蛇形石化產(chǎn)物的一個小樣本；幾年前在同一地區(qū)鉆探的一口水井釋放了非常多的氫氣，以至于被判定為有爆炸的危險——從而促使政府用混凝土將其封堵住。

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.

氫是一種特殊的物質(zhì)。它是推動阿波羅計劃和航天飛機進入軌道的燃料之一；它是地球上能量密度最大的天然化合物之一。這使得它成為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.

總而言之，生活在阿曼東部山脈下的微生物每年可能消耗數(shù)千噸氫氣——從而導(dǎo)致了這種氣體緩慢的、可控的燃燒，而這些燃燒過程是由它們充滿水的細胞內(nèi)的酶精確控制的。

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.

但這些氫氣只提供了生命方程式的一半：要從氫中產(chǎn)生能量，微生物就需要一些東西來燃燒它，就像人類吸入氧氣來燃燒食物一樣。弄清楚這些微生物在地下氧氣無法到達的地方呼吸著什么，是坦普爾頓計劃中的關(guān)鍵部分。

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.

下午兩點，一輛破舊的小卡車在一條塵土飛揚的小道上駛過鉆井現(xiàn)場。在它后面，六只駱駝排成緊密的隊形小跑著，它們的頭在空中上下擺動：當?shù)氐纳蟊凰┰诙唐?，被帶到溪邊某處的一塊草地上。

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.

坦普爾頓沒有看見駱駝，她興奮地喊道：“金子！”她指著桌子上的一段巖芯，還有一堆硬幣大小的黃色金屬晶體。它們的立方形狀讓她的小笑話露了餡：這些晶體不是真正的金子，而是傻瓜的金子，也叫黃鐵礦。

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.”

黃鐵礦是由鐵和硫構(gòu)成的，它是幾十種已知的“生物成因”礦物之一：它的形成有時是由微生物觸發(fā)的。這些晶體是由微生物細胞呼出的廢物凝聚而成。所以這些黃鐵礦晶體可能是微生物代謝的副產(chǎn)品——一種坦普爾頓稱其為“美麗”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.

回到科羅拉多州的家中，她會像考古學家對待羅馬的垃圾堆一樣，對這些水晶給予細心的關(guān)注。她會把它們切成透明的薄片，放在顯微鏡下觀察。她說，如果黃鐵礦實際上是活細胞的產(chǎn)物，那么微生物“甚至可能就埋藏在礦物中”。她希望能找到它們的化石。

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世紀90年代初，才有人懷疑地球深處可能存在豐富的生命。第一個證據(jù)來自海底下的巖石。

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.

地質(zhì)學家早就注意到，在海床下數(shù)百至數(shù)千英尺深的玄武巖中發(fā)現(xiàn)的火山玻璃里，通常布滿了微小的坑洞和隧道。加州拉荷亞市斯克里普斯海洋研究所火山學家休伯特·斯托迪格爾說:“我們當時還不知道這可能是生物學上的現(xiàn)象?！?br/>
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，挪威卑爾根大學年輕的科學家因古恩·索塞斯提出，這些坑相當于地質(zhì)上的蛀牙洞：微生物在吞噬鐵原子時將它們蝕刻在了火山玻璃上。事實上，索賽斯在這些腔洞中發(fā)現(xiàn)了看似死亡的細胞——就是在海底3000英尺處采集的巖石樣本中。

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.

當這些被發(fā)現(xiàn)時，坦普爾頓還沒有進入這個領(lǐng)域。1996年，她獲得了地球化學碩士學位，之后在加州的勞倫斯伯克利國家實驗室找到了一份工作。在那里，她對微生物吞噬埋藏在前美國海軍基地土壤中的噴氣燃料的速度進行了研究。幾年后，在斯坦福攻讀博士學位時，她研究了地下微生物是如何代謝鉛、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，與生物學教授布拉德利·泰博和斯塔迪格爾一起研究一個相關(guān)問題：微生物是如何以海底玄武玻璃中的鐵和其他金屬為生的？

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，她從一輛汽車大小的潛水器“雙魚座四號”的艙口爬了下來，沉入了大海。夏威夷海底研究實驗室的操縱員特里·克爾比駕駛著這臺潛水器前往夏威夷大島附近的海底火山——羅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，潛艇的泛光燈隱隱約約地照亮了一幅奇異的海底景觀：一堆亂七八糟的東西，像是鼓鼓囊囊的黑色垃圾袋，雜亂地堆在高聳的塔尖上。這些所謂的枕狀玄武巖形成于幾十年前或幾百年前，當時巖漿從裂縫中滲出，遇到海水，然后閃冷形成玻璃狀的巖石裂片。坦普爾頓側(cè)身躺在一條長凳上，裹得嚴嚴實實的，抵御著寒冷。她透過一個厚厚的玻璃窗，看著克爾比用飛船的機械鉗子手臂掰下玄武巖碎片。他們被放如海底8小時后，帶著10磅重的巖石回到了海面上。

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，她和斯塔迪格爾造訪了夏威夷的基拉韋厄火山，希望在那里收集到?jīng)]有微生物存在的火山玻璃，以便與深海樣品進行比較。他們穿著笨重的靴子，踏上活躍的熔巖流，踩在一塊只有半英寸厚的堅硬巖石的黑色外殼上。斯塔迪格爾發(fā)現(xiàn)了橙色的熔巖從覆蓋著的地殼中噴發(fā)出來的地方。他用一根金屬棒把發(fā)光的材料舀起來，撲通一聲扔進一桶水里。它嘶嘶作響，噼啪作響，把水燒開了，而它則硬化成新的玻璃。

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.

回到實驗室中，坦普爾頓從深海巖石中分離出了幾十種從鐵和錳中濾出的細菌。她和她的同事們將基拉韋厄火山的無菌玻璃放到熔爐中重熔，加入不同數(shù)量的鐵和其他營養(yǎng)物質(zhì)，并在其上培養(yǎng)來自海底的細菌。她用復(fù)雜的X光技術(shù)，著迷地觀察細菌消化礦物質(zhì)的過程。

“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.

“我有一個地下室，里面裝滿了來自海底的玄武巖，因為我放不下它，”有一天，在鉆探間歇，她告訴了我這件事。

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.

但是對坦普爾頓來說，這些巖石，還有那些啃噬它們的動物，有一個主要的缺點：它們來自海底，那里的水中含有氧氣。

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.

氧氣支撐著地球上的每一種動物，從非洲食蟻獸到蚯蚓再到水母；我們的大氣層和大部分海洋中都充滿了這種氣體。但是地球只有一小部分的歷史是富氧的。即使在今天，我們地球的生物圈的大片區(qū)域也從未遇到過氧氣。只要深入基巖幾英尺，它就幾乎不存在了。如果去往太陽系的其他地方，包括火星這樣可能孕育生命的地方，你也找不到它的蹤跡。

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.

當坦普爾頓探索地球深層的生物圈時，她對地球上的生命起源以及太陽系中其他地方的生命起源產(chǎn)生了興趣。地底可以提供一扇窗戶，讓她看到那些遙遠的地方和時代，但前提是她能在氧氣觸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.

東阿曼的群山似乎是一個完美的地方。這一大塊緩慢蛇紋石化的巖石在其內(nèi)部保存了被認為存在于地球深處的缺氧條件和化學反應(yīng)性鐵礦物。

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

坦普爾頓和其他幾個深海生物圈的研究人員參與了一項處于早期計劃階段的重要工作——阿曼鉆探項目。

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.

這項工作是由紐約拉蒙特-多爾蒂地球觀測站的地質(zhì)學家彼得·克萊門一同領(lǐng)導(dǎo)的。他有自己的使命：阿曼的深部巖石不僅與氧氣和水發(fā)生反應(yīng)，還與二氧化碳發(fā)生反應(yīng)，將氣體從大氣中拉扯出來，鎖入碳酸鹽礦中——如果能理解這一過程，就能幫助人類抵消部分的碳排放。

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，克萊門就在瓦迪拉瓦尼鉆井現(xiàn)場。他對找到生命的前景很樂觀。這些巖石最初形成的溫度超過1800華氏度。但是它們很快就會冷卻下來，而今天，頂部的1000英尺巖石的溫度在華氏90度左右徘徊。他說，這些巖石“自白堊紀(恐龍時代)以來還沒有熱到足以殺死微生物的程度”。

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.

下午三點，在鉆井現(xiàn)場，六名隊員聚集在了鉆井平臺附近，開始了一項每小時都進行一次的儀式：懸疑時刻。

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.

一段剛從鉆孔中挖出的巖芯被放入鋸木機中，鋸木機是一個石質(zhì)圓柱體，長10英尺，和棒球棒的粗頭一樣大，并被隱藏在金屬管中。

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.

工人們抬起了管子的一端。隨著一股黑色粘稠物噴涌而出，巖芯滑了出來。一團又濃又黑的污泥滴在地上。巖芯從頭到尾都被它包裹住了。

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

“哦，我的上帝，嘔”有人說道。周圍的人都在竊竊私語。

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氣泡，讓人想起熱食用油里的氣泡。石頭不再在地下加壓，而是在我們眼前冒氣，氣泡從巖石的孔隙中噴出。下水道的氣味和燒焦的橡膠味散發(fā)到了空氣中，這種氣味對在場的科學家們來說立刻就有了意義。

“That rock is seriously alive,” said Templeton.

“那塊巖石真的還有生物存在，”坦普爾頓說道。

“Hydrogen sulfide,” said Kelemen.

“硫化氫，”克萊門說道。