科學美國人60秒英文文本
The meek may not just inherit the Earth, they could help keep the planet cool.
The meek in this case being ants.
For a quarter-century, geographer Ronald Dorn of Arizona State University and his students have studied how ants, termites and tree roots affect rock weathering.
Rocks like plagioclase and olivine that contain calcium and magnesium naturally absorb carbon dioxide to become limestone or dolomite.
The more rock that’s exposed, the more CO2 gets trapped.
And ants apparently greatly speed up that process.
At Dorn's six test sites in Arizona and Texas, eight different kinds of ants were found to accelerate the absorption of atmospheric CO2 by as much as 335 times compared with ant-free areas.
螞蟻.jpg
The research is in the journal Geology.
Exactly how ants enhance this carbon dioxide trapping remains unclear.
The activity could even be due not to the ants, but to the microbes they carry.
Regardless, there are a lot of ants on Earth, as many as 10 trillion individuals by one estimate.
Dorn even speculates that the proliferation of ants some 66 million years ago might be why this recent Cenozoic era has been, until very recently, so much cooler than earlier epochs.
Aesop gave ants a reputation for being hard workers.
A lot of that effort may have been for a moderate climate's benefit.
科學美國人60秒中文翻譯：
謙卑之人不僅能夠贏得天下，而且還可以幫助這顆星球降溫。
這里的謙卑之人指的是螞蟻。
亞利桑那州立大學地理學家羅納德·朵恩和他的學生們25年來一直從事螞蟻，白蟻及樹根對巖石風化影響的研究。
比如含有鈣和鎂的斜長石和橄欖石可以自然吸收二氧化碳轉變成石灰?guī)r和白云石。
暴露的巖石越多，吸收的二氧化碳就越多。
而明顯的是，正是螞蟻大大加速了這一進程。
在亞利桑那州和德克薩斯州的6個實驗場所，朵恩的團隊發(fā)現(xiàn)8種不同類型的螞蟻可以加速對空氣中二氧化碳的吸收，而且是沒有螞蟻地方的約335倍。
這項研究已經(jīng)在《地質學》雜志上發(fā)表。
目前仍不清楚螞蟻是如何具體加速二氧化碳吸收。
但這一加速過程甚至可能不是出于螞蟻自身，而是因為它們所攜帶的微生物所致。
無論如何，在地球上有很多螞蟻，據(jù)估計大約有10萬億多。
朵恩甚至推測大約6600萬年前螞蟻的增殖可能就是導致近，新生代氣候形成的原因，直到近比早先時代的氣溫低很多。
作家伊索盛贊螞蟻是辛勤的工人。
而它們的辛勤付出可能會有益于溫和氣候的形成。