recent workshop on methane hydrates

[bananas]

http://climateprogress.org/2008/04/16/methane-hydrates-whats-the-worst-and-best-that-could-happen/

Methane Hydrates: What’s the worst — and best — that could happen?

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A recent workshop was held — “Vulnerability and Opportunity of Methane Hydrates Workshop,” IIASA, 13-14 March 2008. You can find most of the presentations here. Science magazine (here, subs. req’d) ran a summary of the meeting recently, which I will reprint below:

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VIENNA, AUSTRIA–A recent workshop on methane hydrates felt like a powwow of 19th century California gold prospectors, looking ahead to both riches and peril. Sizing up the prize, Arthur Johnson, a veteran geologist of the oil industry who is now an energy consultant based in Kenner, Louisiana, predicted that “within a decade or two, hydrates will grow to 10% to 15% of natural gas production,” becoming a more than $200 billion industry. And the peril? “The worst-case scenario is that global warming triggers a decade-long release of hundreds of gigatons of methane, the equivalent of 10 times the current amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere,” said David Archer, a climate modeler at the University of Chicago in Illinois. Although no current model predicts such an event, said Archer, “we’d be talking about mass extinction.”

<snip>

Johnson threw cold water on the scenario of a massive release of submarine hydrate-trapped methane to the atmosphere. Most hydrate deposits found so far “are as deep as a kilometer below the sea floor,” he says, “and they aren’t going anywhere.” Walter Oechel, an ecologist and carbon-cycle expert at San Diego State University in California, doesn’t find the “doom-and-gloom scenarios” very likely either. “The real story for me is hydrates as yet another chronic contributor to greenhouse gas emissions,” he says.

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[kristopher]

1. You've heard me mention this often.

Frankly, the lack of knowledge we have regarding the release point scares the shit out of me.

[phantom power]

2. I have to go with Oechel...

The "best" case for methane hydrates is plenty bad enough: we mine them successfully and release a shitload of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Every time I think about the worst case, I black out.

[madokie]

3. I was trying to put things in perspective but so far I haven't found anything that shows

the relationship between size and amount. How much gas is in how much of this stuff, say a cubic ft would be ? gas. Personally I think we need to go on and not mess with that because there is some movement in the renewable energy sector and I would like to see that continue. It there's another source of fuel to be exploited then all bets on anything else is off.

[kristopher]

4. Have you ever read up on the Permian-Triassic extinction event

"The Permian-Triassic extinction, informally known as the Great Dying, the P-Tr boundary, or the “mother of all mass extinctions,” is the most severe extinction event in the history of life on Earth. Occurring 251.4 million years ago, the Permian-Triassic extinction was a relatively sudden event, lasting less than 80,000 years with the most severe pulses lasting as little as 5,000 years. About 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species went extinct, with many important Paleozoic families, such as euryptids (sea scorpions), trilobites, and both acanthodians (jawless fish) and placoderms (armored fish) dying out completely. Overall about 90% of species were wiped out, in contrast to the demise of only 60% of species in the Cretaceous-Tertiary event 65.5 million years ago, which wiped out the dinosaurs.

Life’s recovery after the Permian-Triassic extinction was the slowest ever, requiring 5-10 million years rather than the typical less than a million. The few genera that survived went on to become worldwide in extent, arguably the least diverse that life had ever been since the beginning of the Cambrian. Lystrosaurus, a medium-sized herbivore that is the ancestor of all mammals, made up 90% of all terrestrial animals for millions of years after the extinction event. The Permian-Triassic extinction is also the only known mass extinction of insects.

Plant life was devastated. Perhaps 95% of all land plants were exterminated. In many areas, river flow patterns changed from meandering to braided, much like they were in the early Silurian, prior to the evolution of land plants. There was a brief worldwide fungal spike, caused by a vast increase in the amount of dead relative to living organic material. This portion of the fossil record is powerful evidence that the extinction was relatively brief, rather than occurring as a gradual process that only wiped out large numbers of genera over time.

After extensive debate and analysis, scientists have come to a general consensus of what caused the Permian-Triassic extinction. At first, scientists suspected an asteroid impact, much like what killed the dinosaurs. However, a telltale iridium layer, expected to be deposited by a large asteroid impact, is missing from the Permian-Triassic boundary. Instead, blame fell on a massive and extended flood basalt (supervolcano) eruption which formed what is called the Siberian Traps. The Siberian Traps were formed by lava being pumped out around a cubic kilometer of lava every year for 40,000 – 200,000 years, at least 20% of it pyroclastically — ejected upwards violently rather than released as a runny ooze. Initially this would have blocked out the sun and caused globally cooling, and much of land life would have been disrupted by thick layers of molten ash deposited across a region the size of Asia.

It is not thought to be the volcanism alone which caused the Permian-Triassic extinction. One of the biggest clues from the strata of the time period is an increase in the ratio of Carbon-12 isotope to Carbon-13. After scratching their heads for many years about the precise cause of the change, scientists determined that only one event could have caused a change as large as the one measured: the mass release of methane clathrates from the world’s oceans.

Methane clathrates are methane molecules trapped in a matrix of ice crystals, located half a kilometer to a kilometer underneath the continental boundaries of the world. Estimates of the quantity of methane clathrates in the world’s oceans today range from 3,000 to 20,000 gigatons, and the amount is thought to have been similar prior to the Permian-Triassic boundary. The Siberian Traps eruptions mainly poured their lava into areas composed of shallow seas, which would have caused the mass release of methane. Methane is about 20 times more effective at causing global warming than carbon dioxide, and it would have been released in massive quantities.

Methane being released would have caused the globe, including the oceans, to warm, further releasing more methane clathrates and accelerating the warming. The majority of the world’s clathrates may have been released in a time span as little as 5,000, causing catastrophic warming. This warming would decrease the temperature gradients between the poles, preventing the transfer of nutrients from land to sea, causing massive algal blooms that consumed the oceans’ oxygen and causing widespread anoxia. Without oxygen, most of the marine fauna perished. Anaerobic green sulfur bacteria thrived, displacing other bacteria and causing large hydrogen sulfide emissions, destroying the ozone layer and exposing land life to damaging UV rays. Evidence of UV damage has been found in plant fossils from the era.

The Permian-Triassic extinction occurred over a relatively short period where a chain reaction of events caused practically everything that could go wrong with the Earth’s biosphere to do so."

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-the-permiantriassic-extinction-event.htm

This is a genie there is no putting back in the bottle. We really have almost no idea of the conditions that would cause the mass release of this methane. We also have very little solid information on the deep water changes that are resulting from our present rate of warming.