寻找应对气候变化的"良方"

Jacquelyn Gill: Understanding the past is often the key to understanding the future.

杰奎琳·吉尔：了解过去通常是预知未来的关键。

You’re listening to Jacquelyn Gill,PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s been researching a period of rapid cooling that occurred about 13,000 years ago. Gill said that global temperatures took an extreme and sudden dip, just as the world was coming out of an ice age. Gill spoke with EarthSky at a science meeting in late 2009.

您刚才听到的是来自威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校的博士生杰奎琳·吉尔的讲话。吉尔研究了13000年前地球气温急速下降的一段时期。她在2009年末一次科学大会上接受采访时告诉我们，冰河世纪末期全球气温经历了一次骤降。

Jacquelyn Gill: It’s important because it’s one of our best-dated and most studied examples of rapid climate change.

杰奎琳·吉尔：这段时期非常重要，因为它地质年代精确，为科学家研究气候突变提供了宝贵资料。

Gill has been studying animals that lived around that time, using fungal spores preserved in sediment as an indicator of the presence of wildlife. She’s found that extinctions of big ice age animals – creatures like mastodons – happened about 1,000 years before this brief cooling period.

吉尔通过研究地质沉降物中保存下来的真菌孢子，来分析这段时期前后动物的生存状况。她发现距离气温骤降约1000年前，乳齿象等冰川期大型动物开始灭绝。

Jacquelyn Gill: Immediately following the decline in these animal populations, the first wildfires pop up on the landscape. We also see widespread vegetation change. So it really seems like the landscape is noticing the loss of these herbivores.

杰奎琳·吉尔：动物大量死亡后不久地球上开始出现森林大火。紧接着地表植被发生改变，仿佛感觉到了食草动物的消失。

She said that scientists still aren’t sure why animals of the ice age died off, or why the world’s climate might suddenly warm and cool. But, she added, mining the past for clues about rapid climate change could help us better understand how the environment stands to be affected by today’s global warming.

吉尔表示，目前科学家还无法确定冰河时期动物灭绝的原因、以及为什么全球气候会发生骤变。但她同时指出，从历史中寻求线索将有助于人们更好地理解现在全球变暖对环境造成的影响。