Relief From All the Fountains of the Deep

Posted by James Bowery on Sunday, 06 April 2008 01:32.

Previously, in All the Fountains of the Deep Burst Forth, I outlined a nightmare scenario, predicated on enormous solubility of methane gas in deep stagnant ocean waters, wherein the emerging energy crisis motivated reckless entrepreneurs to “uncork” those enormous stores of dissolved methane gas resulting in a catastrophic release of methane into the atmosphere on a scale that conceivably could extinguish most life as is hypothesized to have occurred during the Permian extinction event.

Our own GT offered some relief by assuring us that such stagnation is unlikely in today’s oceans as compared to those of the Permian period, when all land masses were joined in one continent known as Pangaea, and the oceans were therefore also radically different.

It took me a while but I’ve now located additional, and even more compelling relief from the dissolved methane nightmare scenario.

In Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions: COMMENT by Gerald R. Dickens; Department of Earth Sciences, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77005, USA; Published Online: January 2004 we see the following phase diagrams which imply that solubility of methane gas in liquid water simply cannot reach the enormous levels hypothesized under the nightmare scenario. Methane concentration is limited as it precipitates out as solid “methane ice”, which either floats to the surface or is buried in relatively stabilized sedimentation on the ocean floor:

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Comments:

Posted by Riley DeWiley on Sun, 06 Apr 2008 08:06 | #

So I can quit worrying?

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:14 | #

Worry is generally a waste of energy, although it seems we are all subject to that human frailty.

IMHO, the actuarially significant danger of some kind of environmental catastrophe from entrepreneurial release of dissolved methane still exists, but I would not put it at the level of a major extinction event. Since earth-bound technological civilization is, itself, a major extinction event when viewed from a broader “family of life” perspective, I would say that the far bigger concern is how to terminate terrestrial technological civilization with minimal further damage—consistent with humanity’s heliocentric evolution.

Having said that, Ryskin does have a rejoinder to Dickens which is definitely worth considering, in which he implicitly proposed further experimentation in the kinetics of gas-hydrate formation be conducted before we lay to rest the significant possibility of super-saturated dissolved methane in deep ocean stagnant water. He even uses the word “worrisome”. IMHO, such experiments should be pursued with some urgency.

Posted by kurt9 on Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:09 | #

Assuming that there is a method to tap these methane reserves for energy production, does this not put paid to any notion of “peak oil” or “peak gas”?

Someone should post this methane stuff on the various “peak oil” blogs and watch the responses.