Quote:
Originally Posted by popcorninthesofa
Folks; I've been awake all night trying to understand why our government would not accept help and take away our constitutional rights during this catastrophy. Now I'm thinking it could be because of the methane bulge on the ocean floor which can explode. Did anyone hear about this new info? I've been searching for hours. Here at http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease...thegreat-dying is what they said methane can do in the ocean. |
Popcorn:
I'm aware of this hypothesis and, as far as it goes to explain the P/T boundary extinction event it is certainly interesting. However, I don't think that it actually relates to *this* situation. There are concerns about a rapid release of methane (which is ALSO a greenhouse gas) but not because of the oil spill. Rather, there is a lot---I mean a HUGE amount--of methane locked up in the tundra and at the bottom of the ocean. If a large enough rise in temperature were to occur then that methane would be released into the atmosphere but not explosively. It would still be a BAD DAY but it wouldn't be a P/T extinction kind of bad day. Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO_2 but that is mitigated by having a very short (10 years) half-life in atmosphere.
I'm not aware of a large amount of methanehydrate at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico (full disclosure, I am NOT an oceanographer) and could not find anything to suggest that there is one. Whatever incompetencies and/or willful blindness on the part of our government regarding this disaster, I am fairly confident that fears of a P/T style extinction isn't one of them. I say this for two reasons--firstly, that kind of mass extinction is vanishingly improbable (while still having a probability that is not identical to zero) and is not likely to be triggered by THIS disaster. Secondly, there is a far more serious threat that we know, for a fact, has caused at least one mass extinction in the last 100 million years and our government is putting scant resources into either detecting the threat or planning what to do if (when?) that threat appears. I'm talking, of course, about large asteroids that are on orbits that might bring them perilously close to the Earth. (That said, a new large telescope has just gone online in Hawaii and it will be dedicated--at least part of the time--to detecting 'killer' asteroids.)
Thirdly, there are some things that if they happen we just can't do anything about. An asteroid we *might* be able to handle but if a very large pocket of methane is going to explode, it will happen without warning and if it's serious enough to cause a P/T scale extinction there's nothing we can do about it. The other one is a gamma-ray burst from an inconveniently near supernova. One of those would make for a VERY BAD DAY hear on Earth and we wouldn't know about it until it happened since the signal that it had happened would be the light from the supernova itself which would, of course, have gamma-rays as part of it.
I would't stay up worrying about the methane.
Cheers
Aj