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In The Other Side of Everest, the British mountaineer and filmmaker Matt Dickinson records how Howard Somervell, 在《珠穆朗玛峰的另一侧》中，英国登山家兼电影制片人马特迪金森记录下了霍华德萨默维尔的情况。 o
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People who habitually live at altitude have often spent thousands of years developing disproportionately large chests and lungs, increasing their density of oxygen-bearing red blood cells by almost a third, though there are limits to how much thicken
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Air is deceptive stuff. Even at sea level, we tend to think of the air as being ethereal and all but weightless. In fact, it has plenty of bulk, and that bulk often exerts itself. As a marine scientist named Wyville Thomson wrote more than a century
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Certainly there is no shortage of energy in the world above our heads. One thunderstorm, it has been calculated, can contain an amount of energy equivalent to four days' use of electricity for the whole United States. In the right conditions, storm c
万物简史 第368期:进入对流层(9)
Jet streams, usually located about 30,000 to 35,000 feet up, can bowl along at up to 180 miles an hour and vastly influence weather systems over whole continents, yet their existence wasn't suspected until pilots began to fly into them during the Sec
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At the equator the convection process is generally stable and the weather predictably fair, but in temperate zones the patterns are far more seasonal, localized, and random, which results in an endless battle between systems of high-pressure air and
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What we do know is that because heat from the Sun is unevenly distributed, differences in air pressure arise on the planet. Air can't abide this, so it rushes around trying to equalize things everywhere. Wind is simply the air's way of trying to keep
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Though a lawyer by profession, Hadley had a keen interest in the weather (he was, after all, English) and also suggested a link between his cells, the Earth's spin, and the apparent deflections of air that give us our trade winds. However, it was an
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The standard way to envision this is to imagine yourself at the center of a large carousel and tossing a ball to someone positioned on the edge. By the time the ball gets to the perimeter, the target person has moved on and the ball passes behind him
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However, for reasons unknown he calibrated the instrument in a way that put freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 degrees. From the outset this numeric eccentricity bothered some people, and in 1742 Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, came up w
万物简史 第374期:进入对流层(15)
To these he subsequently added a fourth term, nimbus (from the Latin for cloud), for a rain cloud. The beauty of Howard's system was that the basic components could be freely recombined to describe every shape and size of passing cloudstratocumulus,
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Any water molecule that strays beyond the edge of the cloud is immediately zapped by the dry air beyond, allowing the cloud to keep its fine edge. 要是水分子越出该云边缘，外面干燥的空气马上会把它除掉，从而使积云的边缘
万物简史 第376期:进入对流层(17)
When you look at a lake, you are looking at a collection of molecules that have been there on average for about a decade. 要是你望一眼湖水，你看到的是一大堆分子，它们在那里平均已达10年之久。 In the ocean the residence
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Oceans are the real powerhouse of the planet's surface behavior. 海洋是地球表面活动的真正动力源泉。 Indeed, meteorologists increasingly treat oceans and atmosphere as a single system, which is why we must give them a little of our at
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What happens is that surface waters, as they get to the vicinity of Europe, 情况是这样的：表面海水抵达欧洲附近以后， grow dense and sink to great depths and begin a slow trip back to the southern hemisphere. 密度增加，沉到深
