Quote:
Originally Posted by MsDemeanor
I'm no expert, but I imagine that a methane gas leak might be something akin to a submarine volcano. These volcanoes are quite common and rarely cause tsunami activity. There's one that's been active for decades in Lesser Antilles (named Kick 'em Jenny); the worst thing it's caused from what I've read so far is a 2M wave that took out a road. There's huge scientific debate right now about a possible tsunami in Italy from a submarine volcano, but that one involves a massive collapse of the ocean floor. That sort of activity is more in keeping with ocean floor movement that accompanies earthquakes - activity that does cause tsunamis.
Does that help?
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Methane escapes to the atmosphere all the time. The thing is is that the actual science behind the hysteria is really quite interesting. I apologize for the derail but this is really cool stuff and, I think, provides a useful counterpoint to the "oh my god we're all gonna die!" stuff.
There have been 5 major mass extinctions in the history of life on this planet and we are in the middle of the sixth. They are (from most recent to least):
1. Holocene event 12,000 - present. Most likely cause: Us
2. K-T extinction 65 mya. Most likely cause: Meteor strike
3. Triassic-Jurassic extinction 205 mya. Most likely cause: Unknown. Possible meteor strike
4. End Permian event 251 mya. Most likely cause: Unknown.
5. Late Devonian 360 - 375 mya. Most likely cause: Unknown
6. End Ordovician 440 - 450 mya. Most likely cause: Unknown
So the three oldest extinctions we don't know why. The one everyone wants to figure out is the End Permian because that was huge. By way of comparison the K-T extinction (the one everyone knows because it took out the dinosaurs) took down 17% of all families, 50% of all genera, and 75% of all species. The End Permian extinction took out 57% of families, 83% of all genera, 96%! of all marine species and 70% of all terrestrial species. An event that big--and that is as close to life has come to being wiped out since bacteria got things booted up--begs an explanation. The interesting hypothesis which seems to have the *best* data to support it is that there was a huge sudden release of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and there is a 6 degree C rise in temp at the right place in the geological record.
That's the background behind this whole methane bubble hysteria. The thing is, the methane compounds that may have caused the Permian event are not present in the Gulf of Mexico in any significant amounts and they are *not* the form of methane compounds being detected in elevated levels.
Look, both the Universe and the Earth would be perfectly happy to see us all go. Hell, the Universe positively *wants* to kill us--big rocks, gamma-ray bursts, galactic collisions, the Sun expanding and that's just the ways I can think of off the top of my head. It is endless in its creativity of ways to shuffle our species off this mortal coil. The Earth isn't that much more benign toward our presence. But this man-made catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico isn't a threat to the species. It's a threat to a way of life and it *should be* (but won't be) a threat to BPs continued existence but it isn't an extinction level event by any stretch nor will it precipitate one.
Cheers
Aj