“The embarrassing reality is we don’t have any solid confirmation that these connections are causative rather than correlative,” says Charles Paull, a marine geologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, who has studied this western Atlantic region in detail. He says that this latest work provides credible evidence that thermal changes in the oceans can destabilize hydrates.
But Mark Maslin, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, takes issue with the authors’ claim that destabilized hydrates make this area more vulnerable to slope failures — temperature changes alone won't trigger underwater landslides. "Dramatic degassing events require a change in pressure," he says.
There are other hydrate deposits around the world that deserve attention. The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, dramatic loss of sea ice and changing oceanographic conditions. Essentially, says Ruppel, it is the place undergoing the maximum amount of change and therefore the best place to study these dynamics. She is now collaborating with Hornbach to collect more data there. “Ground zero for this research is in the Arctic,” says Hornbach.
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on October 25, 2012.
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Add Comment"Whether that methane would make it to the atmosphere and worsen global warming is unclear, but scientists think that it is unlikely. “We don’t need to worry about any huge blow of methane into the atmosphere,” says Carolyn Ruppel, a geophysicist at the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMakes one wonder why this "perceived" catastrophe, is constantly being flung out in the MSM. I'm sure it won't be long before Sci-Am publishes another story, claiming the exact opposite. Alarmism can never be falsified, because there are always potential catastrophe and some of those catastrophes will happen, as they have historically from time to time.
The skeptics job is to try and sort out "The sky is falling" from the natural variations which could cause problems. This ensures resources are not miss-deployed, and are available for real emergencies, both prophylactic and direct. We need no climate "cane toads" nor "run for the hills" confusion added. GK
GK:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHave you not heard of AGW caused by an increase in CO2? The troubling part about your attitude is that you fail to acknowledge that "resources" (dollar bills) may be invested in alternative energy, an investment that has already been proven to be profitable in the current economic environment, and one that, most likely, will be the only way forward.
Karst is an AGW denialist. He cherry-picks data and quote-mines like a champion. He's irrationsl; don't pay attention to him.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou can tell that GK gets all of his information from Fox News, because of his genius use of the term "MSM". How many more studies do we need showing that Fox News viewers are the least-informed viewers on TV? People who don't read newspapers or watch the news score higher than Fox News viewers in information tests.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe below article lists no less than SEVEN studies showing that Fox News Viewers are one step above pet rocks when talking about knowledge of anything of importance in the news.
STUDIES:
1. http://climateshiftproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/FeldmanStudy.pdf
(this one is MSNBC vs CNN vs Fox News - guess which one is dead last...
2. http://woods.stanford.edu/docs/surveys/Global-Warming-Fox-News.pdf
3. http://www.kff.org/healthreform/upload/8148.pdf
4. http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2009/08/19/4431138-first-thoughts-obamas-good-bad-news
5. http://www.comm.ohio-state.edu/kgarrett/MediaMosqueRumors.pdf
6. http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf
7. http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf
Queue GK talking about how all studies are made up by bad scientists - all science is wrong - and the MSM is the problem.
"Reality a well-known liberal bias!!: ~ Stephen Tyrone Colbert
Oops... "Reality has a well-known liberal bias." Sorry for messing up your quote, S Tyrone Colbert!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI haven't a clue how "FOX" enters the discussion. I retired to a farm (in the middle of nowhere) many years ago. If I had a tower antenna, I probably could pick up a signal, but it certainly wouldn't be FOX.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere was a "fox" in my barnyard the other day, but I introduced him to my "little friend" and he is no more.
Perhaps y'all have spent too long sniffing methane (NG), in your ovens, to know sh*t from putty. GK
G.K. You are on the receiving end of programmed responses in the style of Ingsoc or DuckSpeak ( George Orwell )where political responses are set up on automatic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThomas Paine
To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.
Else we wouldn't have to listen to the drivel discarding scientific method in favour of Authority, which asserts AGW and claims to 'scientifically' predict the future. That's an interesting problem in experimental verification.