【正确答案】
D
【答案解析】[听力原文] Earlier this year, British explorer Pen Huddle and his team tracked for three months across the frozen Arctic Ocean, taking measurements and recording observations about the ice. 'Well, we've been led to believe that we would encounter a good proportion of this older, thicker, technically multi-year ice that's been around for a few years and just get thicker and thicker. We actually found there wasn't any multi-year ice at all.' Satellite observations and submarine service over the past few years had shown less ice in the polar region. But the recent measurements show the lost is more pronounced than previously thought. 'We are looking at roughly 80 percent loss of ice cover on the Arctic ocean in ten years, roughly ten years and 100 percent loss in nearly twenty years.' Cambridge scientist Peter Waddams, who's been measuring and monitoring the Arctic since 1971, says the decline is irreversible. 'The more you lose, the more open water is created, the more warming goes on in that open water during the summer, the less ice forms in the winter, the more melt there is the following summer. It becomes a breakdown process where everything ends up accelerating until it's all gone.' Martin Summercorn runs the Arctic program for the environmental charity the World Wildlife Fund. 'The Arctic sea ice holds a central position in the earth's climate system and it's deteriorating faster than expected. Actually, it has to translate into more urgency to deal with the climate change problem and reduce emissions.' Summercorn says a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming needs to come out of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December. 'We have to basically achieve there—the commitment to deal with the problem now. That's the minimum. We have to do that equitably. And that we have to find a commitment that is quick.' Waddams echoes the need for urgency. 'The carbon that we've put into the atmosphere keeps having a warming effect for 100 years. So we have to cut back rapidly now. Because it would take a long time to work its way through into our response by the atmosphere. We can't switch off global warming just by being good in the future. We have to start being good now.' Waddams says there is no easy technological fix to climate change. He and other scientists say there are basically two options to replacing fossil fuels. Generating energy with renewables or embracing nuclear power. What did Pen Huddle and his team do in the Arctic Ocean?