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Two days after arriving at the Aurora seamount, NUI dived to Aurora.
抵达奥洛拉海底山两天后，NUI下潜至海底热泉区。
As the orange sub sank in the long Arctic twilight, a gentle snow fell on fields of frost flowers carpeting the ice.
当这艘橙色的潜水器在北极漫长的暮色中下沉时，一场轻柔的雪落在了覆盖着霜花的冰面上。
It took hours for the submersible to descend to the seafloor. In the control room a pilot maneuvered the vehicle.
潜水器花了好几个小时才潜到海底。在控制室里，一名驾驶操纵着潜水器。
An hour later, the trouble started. As NUI neared its destination, its onboard systems blinked off one by one.
一小时后，问题出现了。NUI靠近目的地时，机载系统的灯号开始陆续闪灭。
Then the pilot reported that he'd lost control of the submersible.
接着，驾驶报告对潜水器失去控制。
After a bit, the team commanded the vehicle to drop its dive weights and begin rising to the surface. Instead, NUI sank.
过了一会儿，研究团队指示潜水器卸除配重，开始上升到海面。但NUI却开始下沉。
A few minutes later, the sub's depth reading marched across the screen in an ominous flat line -- it was on the seafloor.
几分钟之后，潜水器的深度读数在屏幕上呈现出一条不祥的直线--它沉到海底了。
Maybe the weights didn't drop; or maybe a crucial housing had sprung a leak, the sub had flooded, and it was now too heavy to rise to the surface.
或许下潜配重并没有卸除，又或者关键的外壳破裂，造成潜水器进水，导致变得太重而无法上升至海面。
On a scale of zero to 10, I asked German, how worried are you?
严重程度从零到十，我问杰尔曼有多担心？
"Ten," he said. "Ten. There's a legitimate risk of a very bad thing."
“十”，他说，“发生了非常糟糕的事情，这种风险是存在的。”
Returning home without NUI -- the team's prized instrument, the potential forebear of tomorrow's spacefaring submersibles -- would be "pretty atrocious," he said.
他表示，NUI是研究团队的珍贵仪器，也是未来宇宙航行潜水器的可能前身，如果把它丢在海底就这样回去，“简直糟糕透顶。”
It's so close to the vents that if we could turn on NUI's camera, he continued, we'd probably be staring Aurora in the face.
他继续说，NUI非常靠近热泉，如果打开潜水器上的摄影机，或许会直接对着喷口。
The NUI team monitored the sub's location for any changes while Hand and several other people MacGyvered an orange, shoebox-size underwater vehicle from spare parts.
NUI团队持续监控潜水器的位置有没有变化，而汉德和其他几个人则在利用备用品拼凑一艘鞋盒大小的橘色潜水器。
They were planning a desperate rescue mission that, as far as I could figure, involved fishing for NUI with the makeshift device.
就我所知，他们正在计划一项孤注一掷的救援任务，要用这个临时拼凑的装置去钓NUI。
But that morning there was good news: NUI was on its way back up.
不过，那天早上传来了好消息：NUI正在返航中。
The final fail-safe -- a corrodible wire attaching the dive weights to the submersible -- had worked.
最后的失效安全装置（一条把配重绑在潜水器上的可腐蚀线）发挥了作用。
It had just taken longer than the anticipated 24 to 48 hours for salty seawater to gnaw through the wire, probably because chemistry happens at a slower pace in subfreezing Arctic seawater.
可能因为在冰点以下的北极海水里，化学反应发生的速度比较慢，咸水蚀穿这条线的时间比预期的24到48小时还要久。
By that afternoon, NUI was back on board, having helpfully surfaced under a rare patch of thin ice rather than the thick floes covering the area.
到了下午，NUI已经回到船上，幸好它是在一片罕见的薄冰下浮出水面，而不是覆盖该地区的厚浮冰。
NUI wouldn't explore Aurora during this cruise, but it turned out that the vents were still within reach.
NUI在这次的航行中没有探索奥洛拉，但结果证明热泉喷口仍在研究团队可探索的范围内。
That same evening, the ice drift cooperated, and the ship sailed right over the vent field, towing a high-tech camera just above the seafloor.
当天晚上，在漂浮的海冰配合下，我们将一架高科技摄影机垂放到海床上方，用船拖行驶过热泉区。
Aurora, the imagery revealed, was home to a massive black smoker, a rupture more than five feet across that hurled hot, sulfidic minerals into the sea.
影像显示，奥洛拉有个巨大的黑烟囱，这个裂口大概有2公尺宽，不断把炙热的硫化矿物喷入海中。
But as far as hydrothermal vents go, Aurora seemed remarkably unpopulated, said Eva Ramirez-Llodra, the cruise's co-chief scientist.
但是在这次航行中共同主持研究计划的伊娃·拉米雷兹-洛卓拉说，就海底热泉来说，奥洛拉看起来非常荒芜。
We only spotted a handful of snails and crustaceans -- none of the dramatic tube worms or clams that cluster around other deep-sea vents.
我们只发现了少量的海螺和甲壳动物，没有其他深海喷口周围群聚的夸张管虫或蚌蛤。
Amid the desolation, though, a garden of glass sponges bloomed.
不过在一片荒芜之中，却出现了一大片玻璃海绵。
These filigreed creatures, seemingly the only organisms in abundance down there, are sometimes said to be barely alive.
这些有如细工饰品的生物似乎是那里唯一大量存在的生物，但有时会被认为扡们只是勉强活着。
Their skeletons are made mostly of silica rather than calcium carbonate. And that makes sense. In the deep sea, silica is common. Life -- these otherworldly sponges -- found a way to use it.
玻璃海绵的骨骼主要由二氧化硅组成，而不是碳酸钙。这很合理。在深海里，二氧化硅很常见。而这些彷如异星生物的海绵，找到了利用它的方法。
