just doesn't feel right.

The problem is that the ice-like substance is abundant on the continental shelves and in many places holds the soft sediments together that would otherwise have disappeared toward the ocean floor long ago. The hydrates/mud mix is often located over methane vents, trapping the gas and thus preventing it forming hydrates with seawater.

All not very upsetting, it only may become a problem when you try to mine it in the wrong place, as a blowout would destabilize a lot of sediment and lead to underwater avalanches, which in turn then produce tsunamis because of the sudden displacement of a lot of water. As only about 1-2% of the seafloor are actually mapped at all, you just don't know where it might be advisable not to try it. That mapping process is albeit very time consuming and expensive, but unlike prospecting for oil, prospecting for hydrates is easy. The incentive is therefore to start mining before doing a very thorough survey of the conditions on that particular piece of continental shelf.

There are sediments in northern England, Scotland and the Orkney islands showing the areas were hit by Tsunamis in the North Sea a few times in their history, with evidence pointing to underwater avalanches on the Norwegian continental shelf where the North Sea floor forms a somewhat narrow deep trench so that the displaced bottom waters have no where to go than up and west even if the shelf collapse isn't especially big.

See, your worry wasn't entirely misplaced. Somehow it rarely is
Cheers.

Personally I welcome our new underwater avalanche overlords...

In 2007.

At the time, the committee predicted a modest rise in temps because of the then future predictions of the CO2 and methane releases.

It was explained that their report was ONLY representative of the PROVEN data.

What was not figured in was;

warming of the tundra and

methane hydride 'mining'

The former is a slow process, taking decades to achieve a significant rise in greenhouse gases.

It is the latter, methane hydride mining, that is the real cause for concern.

Once this process is commercially viable, and this news is just for starters as technology follows need for energy, more and more strides will allow for mining on a HUGE scale.

Methane is so much more 'effective' as a greenhouse gas because it traps 25x more than CO2.

Be afraid of this news; be very afraid!

Although it still contributes to greenhouse gases, I suppose it's better that CO2 is introduced into the atmosphere vs CH4, which will inevitably occur anyway when the ocean temperature rises.

There's more of that crap in the world than coal, oil, or natural gas. We don't need another CO2 emitting substance.

The idiots there think of fire as power.

That's why they doubt solar unless it's the kind that's like a little kid burning ants on the sidewalk with a magnifying glass.

Wind? They think that's just stupid.

Doesn't matter if farmers have had these:



Where's the fire?

It's not REAL power unless it can explode.

They drilled a well around three years ago and did a year of flow rate testing.

As far as I know they are not doing anything at the site this year.

we have to bicker and argue about debt ceilings and sequester and austerity with treasonists who should have been hung for trying to destroy this country

than letting the seas warm, only for it to be released as methane into the atmosphere, which would doom us twenty times as badly. Methane loose in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas 20X worse than the single CO2 molecule produced for each methane molecule burned. The other byproduct is pure water. We're on a path that is out of control and nobody is going to do anything about it, so gathering up all of the presently-sequestered (that's the correct term, btw) methane and burning it before it's loosed upon the atmosphere is pretty danged sensible.

We could not burn all of this off fast enough, even if everything in the world switched to gas.

Methane hydrates are formed from methane and seawater at a temperature between 2-4 degrees centigrade and very high pressure over methane vents on the continental shelves. Although not the ocean floor, this is very, very deep. It will take a long time to warm these waters to the point where the hydrates become unstable. If we mine some of it now and burn it we will only speed up the process of warming. And you really don't want to destabilize the methane hydrates on a large scale as you then will have much more acute problems then further global warming (see my post 10).

Rather concentrate on extracting (or simply burning) gas from the thawing permafrost where the problem of methane as a potent greenhouse gas is very acute and your analysis spot on.