2024届高考英语外刊阅读天天练：综合训练十四

高考英语外刊阅读天天练 综合训练十四 I 阅读理解 Siberia’s ice is melting, revealing its past and endangering its future 【The Washinton Post(January 4, 2024)】 Nikita Zimov walked through the sticky brown muck of Siberia, just above the Arctic Circle. Siberia is heating up almost twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the ice known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages. Its brittle underbrush has fueled vicious forest fires. The melting ice is releasing greenhouse gases. Sheets of the softening land have emerged for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, revealing skeletons, disease and awakening life. Zimov is tracking the effects of the melting and working on a plan to potentially mitigate it. As permafrost melts, microbes feed on the carbon trapped in the ice, releasing carbon dioxide and methane, a more potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. The gas is apparent even in small streams. When Zimov pierced the ground with a long fishing rod, bubbles of gas floated to the surface. The employees at the park monitor the methane emissions. The ground is releasing more greenhouses gases each year than some large countries emit annually. Zimov grew up on the research station, where his father, Sergei, was a scientist. In 2006, Sergei and Alaskan ecologist Katey Walter Anthony published research in Nature detailing how the permafrost's thaw was adding to climate change. The Zimovs decided to address the problem by “re-wilding" the arctic tundra. Their small patch of land is inhabited by cold-weather grazers such as bison and camels, which they hope can flatten and spread out the insulating snow during the winter, allowing the ground to refreeze before the summer months. Time is running out. The melting ground is changing daily life in these remote locations. Infrastructure is collapsing. Homes are crumbling. Zimov collects data on the depth of the permafrost to measure how much is disappearing in