文档介绍：Antarctica Is Being Explored
英译汉
A look at a globe is perhaps the best way to appreciate the significance of this peculiar continent. The globe shows that the entire southern hemisphere is preponderantly water-the widest parts of the Atlantic and Pacific, the unbroken sweep of Antarctic seas circling the world. Although much of South America, parts of Africa and all of Australia lie south of the equator, most of the world's land lies north of the line.
Yet many people, thinking of the distant continent only as a bleak, rocky, cold and inhospitable land mass, may wonder: Why all the fuss? Why protect something so unpromising?
The Antarctica treaty applies to all areas (the high seas excepted) below latitude 60 degrees south. This line, running around the globe some 2,000 miles from the South Pole itself, just misses the lower tip of South America, and is well below the Cape of Good Hope and New Zealand.
There are a number of small islands between this line and the Antarctic continent, but the waters here are known to mariners as "the screaming Sixties" because there is so little obstruction to the world-circling winds.
Antarctica seems a vast basin of rock, filled and overflowing with a load of ice. In the heart of the continent it is almost as high as the summits of the Alps, yet soundings show that in places that rock floor is below sea level.
On all these counts, the scientists justify their voyages to Antarctica and the vast sums needed. But essentially their argument is a simple one. The great continent to the south is still largely unknown. In the quest for fundamental knowledge, which is the heart and soul so all science, it cannot be ignored.
Such satellites-maintaining their steady sweeps as the earth revolves beneath them-cover all parts of the globe and hence are ideal for weather observation, communications and other tasks. The South Pole would be the check point on each circuit, snatching the data from space, processing them puters within