"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 2 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise, just
inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where she
parked the rover and went out through its lock, moving stiffly in a walker
that was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.
She was a kilometer or two away from the rim's edge. She walked slowly east
toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention.
The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some
places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she
was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day,
attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because
near the rim's drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving
ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always
the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the
rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto
the last ledge, a bench only some five meters wide, with a curved back wall,
shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.
This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole
forty-five kilometers across and a full five kilometers deep, and almost
perfectly regular in everyway- circular, flat-floored, almost vertically
walled-a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler's
coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity
of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping
rings, while the very broad shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but
shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic
ideal of a volcanic caldera.
Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the horizontal
stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular detail, rust and
black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in the composition
of the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those above and below,
so that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at different
elevations-isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the immense rock
throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence of the
volcano's magma chamber, located some 160 kilometers below the mountain, had
to have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every
time. Ann wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the
magma chamber had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or
the lava more homogenous.... Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon;
no doubt she could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the
Journal of Analogical Studies, typed in Pavonis: "Evidence of Strombolian
Explosive Activity Found in West Tharsis Clasts." "Radial Ridges in Caldera
and Concentric Graben Outside the Rim Suggest Late Subsidence of the Summit."
She had just crossed some of those graben. "Release of Juvenile Volatiles into
Atmosphere Calculated by Radiometric Dating of Lastflow Mafics."
She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the latest
areology, she hadn't for years. Even reading the abstracts would have taken
far more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been badly
compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the metanats
had concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found signs
of ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of ancient
life; on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased seismic