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  3. Eight times within the past million years, something in the Earth’s climatic equation has changed, allowing snow in the mountain

Eight times within the past million years, something in the Earth’s climatic equation has changed, allowing snow in the mountain

admin2012-10-23  56
问题     Eight times within the past million years, something in the Earth’s climatic equation has changed, allowing snow in the mountains and the northern latitudes to accumulate from one season to the next instead of melting away. Each time, the enormous ice sheets resulting from this continual buildup lasted tens of thousands of years until the end of each particular glacial cycle brought a warmer climate. Scientists speculated that these glacial cycles were ultimately driven by astronomical factor: slow, cyclic changes in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and in the tilt and orientation of its spin axis. But up until around 30 years ago, the lack of an independent record of ice-age timing made the hypothesis untestable.
    Then in the early 1950’s Emiliani produced the first complete record of the waxings and wanings of first glaciations. It came from a seemingly odd place, the seafloor. Single-cell marine organisms called "foraminifera" house themselves in shells made from calcium carbonate. When the foraminifera die, sink to the bottom, and become part of seafloor sediments, the carbonate of their shells preserves certain characteristics of the seawater they inhabited. In particular, the ratio of a heavy isotope of oxygen (oxygen-18) to ordinary oxygen (oxygen-16) in the carbonate preserves the ratio of the two oxygens in water molecules.
    It is now understood that the ratio of oxygen isotopes reflects the proportion of the world’s water locked up in glaciers and ice sheets. A kind of meteorological distillation accounts for the link. Water molecules containing the heavier isotope tend to condense and fall as precipitation slightly sooner than molecules containing the lighter isotope. Hence, as water vapor evaporated from warm oceans moves away from its source, its oxygen- 18 returns more quickly to the oceans than does its oxygen-16. What falls as snow on distant ice sheets and mountain glaciers is relatively depleted of oxygen-18. As the oxygen-18-poor ice builds up, the oceans become relatively enriched in the isotope. The larger the ice sheets grow, the higher the proportion of oxygen-18 becomes in seawater--and hence in the sediments
    Analyzing cores drilled from seafloor sediments, Emiliani found that the isotopic ratio rose and fell in rough accord with the Earth’s astronomical cycles. Since that pioneering observation, oxygenisotope measurements have been made on hundreds of cores. The combined record enables scientists to show that the re-cord contains the very periodicities as the orbital processes. Over the past 800, 000 years, the global ice volume peaked every 100,000 years, matching the period of the orbital eccentricity variation. In addition, "wrinkles" superposed on each cycle--small decreases or surges in ice volume--have come at intervals of roughly 23,000 and 41,000 years, in keeping with the precession and tilt frequencies of the Earth’s spin axis.
As pointed out in the text, the ratio of oxygen-18 to oxygen-16 in seafloor sediments and that of these isotopes locked in glaciers and ice-sheets are ______
选项 A、irrelevant.
B、correlated.
C、corresponding.
D、identical.
答案B
解析 题干问：“这篇文章指出，氧18和氧16在海底沉淀物中的比例和这两种同位素在冰山和冰层中的比例是……”。按照对2、3自然段的深入分析，发现这两种比例是相关的。海底的氧18比较多，而冰山的氧16比较多。因此选项B“相关的”为正确选项。而选项A“不相关的”，选项C“一致的”和选项D“相同的”都不是本题干所要求的内容。
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