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It's a country known to contain Permian rock, but always considered too difficult to explore.
那里以富含二叠纪岩石而闻名，但一直被认为是一个探索的艰险之地。
In the late 1990s, he took a gamble and flew out there.
上世纪90年代末，他孤注一掷飞往该地考察。
Piled all our stuff onto a helicopter, flew out into this wilderness,
把所有资料带上直升机飞进这片荒野，
they dropped us in the middle of nowhere and left us there for several weeks.
他们把我们载到一片空旷地，我们在那里一呆就是几个星期。
Their first task was to find the Permian rock.
他们的第一项任务是找到二叠纪岩层。
Nobody even knew where it was.
他们甚至不知道它在哪。
Some of us had never been there before, and we weren't exactly sure where we needed to look.
我们中有些人从没到过那儿，我们根本不知道该去哪里找。
We had a lot of exploration, a lot of wandering around to do before we knew what we were looking for.
我们在找到它之前还要进行大量探险，走很多路。
But finally they found what they had come for.
最后他们终于找到了目标。
It exceeded their widest dreams.
它大大出乎他们的意料。
Instead of the usual narrow band of rock strata,
与平常所见的狭窄岩层不同的是，
the sediments containing the record of the extinction stretched for meters above and below them.
包含大灭绝记录的沉积岩层，上下伸展了数米多宽。
It was one of the best records of the Permian mass extinction ever found
它是记录二叠纪生物大灭绝最完整的岩层之一。
