The Bermuda Triangle and Gas Hydrates

Filed in archive Current News on October 30, 2006

Straight out of your regular science fiction television series. Boats mysteriously sinking. Planes exploding in mid-air. Radar and other navigating equipment going haywire. Sounds like the maiden episode off a bermuda triangle flick. But science fiction it is not. Because these things have happened over the Bermuda Triangle and now we know what is happening. Methane is escaping from under the sea to the atmosphere.

The sudden release of gas hydrates in to the atmosphere has a long-term impact on global warming, but on the short-term, its impacts are as dramatic and tragic. When methane bubbles escape to the air, the density of water as methane goes through the water changes. Methane reduces the density of water so that ships lose buoyancy and sink. As the methane bubbles escape it create a lot of static electricity that changes the magnetic field of the area thus rendering radars useless. Once it is freed in the air, methane being a highly flammable gas, it may produce instantaneous sparks that could decimate a flying vehicle immediately.

And the lessons here are numerous. For example, changing the density of water means designing different rigs ensuring against fire, using different monitoring and navigating equipment for gas hydrate research and in the future, mining. But the potential of gas hydrates is so big that the world is scrambling to understand it and put up commercial and safe production operations, and soon.