Methane Hydrates: A greehouse gas time bomb?
It¹s getting harder and harder to disagree that climate
change is really happening. Since the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide have soared as a result of human activities,
and current levels are the highest in 650,000 years (IPCC, 2007). But what
about other gases in our atmosphere? Methane, for example, is over 60 times
more powerful than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. There is far less of it
in our atmosphere, just 0.5% compared with CO2, but that has not always been
the case. Methane hydrates are a type of mineral made up of methane gas locked
into a crystal lattice of frozen water, a bit like ice. Deep sea sediments hold
an estimated 3000 Giga tons of carbon in the form of methane hydrates, and
these rocks are extremely sensitive to small changes in temperature and
pressure. On dissociation, the release of methane can lead to a runaway global
warming effect.
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