Clathrates

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THE POISON IS THE CURE:
Clathrates, Methane Trigger, Alt.fuels & Telluric Currents

The global warming/environmental risk in clatrates is in NOT mining them.  Researchers in Alaska have successfully drilled gas hydrates -- frozen methane deposits that could someday replace petroleum as a key energy source.

http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0222-hydrates.html

 

Methane hydrate can only form naturally in sediments at reasonably high pressures and low temperatures. Deposits can escape spontaneously from the ocean bed and their plumes of effervescent bubbles, perhaps up to 20-30 feet in diameter, have been blamed for otherwise unexplained disappearances of ships and rising methane might even stall aircraft by disturbing oceanic or atmospheric density.

Every now and then, chunks of these erupting clouds of methane hydrates break free and rise rapidly to the surface and into the atmosphere.  Submarine gas releases from the sea floor could, in theory, sink ships with giant bubbles which change the bouyancy of some vessels. Whether or not the ship sinks depends of its relative position to the bubbles.  The methane plume is basically a low-density foam that creates turbulence.

But this is not the only global threat they pose. Methane has a much greater capacity to trap heat in the atmosphere than carbon. When it converts from a solid or ice state to a gaseous state a methane blow-out occurs as a natural phenomenon.

METHANE TRIGGER: Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas which, despite its atmospheric lifetime of around 12 years, none the less has a global warming potential of 62 over 20 years and 21 over 100 years (IPCC, 1996; Berner and Berner, 1996; vanLoon and Duffy, 2000). The sudden release of large amounts of natural gas from methane clathrate deposits is suggested as a cause of past and possibly future climate changes. Events possibly linked in this way are the Permian-Triassic extinction event, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

Methane clathrate, also called methane hydrate or methane ice, is a solid form of water that contains a large amount of methane within its crystal structure (clathrate hydrate). Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the solar system where temperatures are low and water ice is common, extremely large deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth. Hydrates only form in a narrow range of depths such as those of continental shelves.

Methane clathrates are common constituents of the shallow marine geosphere, and they occur both in deep sedimentary structures, and as outcrops on the ocean floor. Methane hydrates are believed to form by migration of gas from depth along geological faults, followed by precipitation, or crystallization, on contact of the rising gas stream with cold sea water.At higher pressures Methane clathrates remain stable at temperatures up to 18 °C. The structure of clathrates is related to that of foams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_hydrate

 

THE THREAT: 165w, 55n Clathrate Trigger

There is a 10 mile wide circular crater with a slightly raised rim at 165w, 55n.  It is barely detectable, but filled with jumbled clathrate and subject to invasion by superheated water from below.  It is most likely too big to be a collapsed volcano, making a large dense meteor hit more plausible.
 
The effect of Arctic warming on world climate could be especially large if warming trends continue to release methane, a greenhouse gas, from the tundra as described earlier. This is especially true if warming begins to melt extensive areas of methane bearing clathrate soils in coastal regions. A potentially extreme case would be if warming in the ocean, for example the shallow Barents Sea, were to cause a massive release of marine gas clathrate deposits.
 
The relatively shallow clathrate deposits of the arctic shelves are already considered to be a great potential energy resource (Max and Lowrie, 1992). Clathrates are a potentially large source of greenhouse gas even in temperate waters (Suess et al., 1999). Recent investigations suggest massive releases of marine clathrates may have been globe altering events in the past (Kerr, 1999).
 
The concentrated clathrates are located where the subduction zone extends farthest north in the south central aleutions as determined by gravity anomaly.  Two oceanic plates are subducting.  They are denser than crustal plates.  In south central Aleuts, the plate underneath is not turning downward. That's where all the clathrates are.  This is not coincidental and it happened before 55 my bp.  Over a few weeks, the arctic became tropical. a little heat, a little push from the next perigean spring tide  Its all set to go and the hottest most unstable part is underlying clathrate megadeposit. 
 
The ph of the overlying water--controlled by carbon dioxide- is what determines the timing.  In turn, the dissolved co2 is determined by concentration of atmosphric co2.  It will happen spontaneously at 700ppm but could be sooner if seismic forces preempt. 
 
MEGA-METHANE BLOW 
 
METHANE RELEASE VIDEO
Based on the seismic record, Thomas predicts a methane blowout north of Unimak island on January 15, 2010 at 165w, 55n.

http://www.aeic.alaska.edu/Seis/recenteqs_sub/quakes/2007030_evid153578/evid153578.html
 
Ken Thomas systematically drove back available data from last two methane chain reaction mega-warmups and they BOTH came to the same spot, 165 w 55 n. Unimak island.  There is a ccircular geological feature of the right age, whether it is volcanic or meteoric.  
 
There's a huge undersea heater between the two oceanic plates here as shown last year by gravimetry. It prewarms the clathrate trigger.   The last 2 ice ages ended abruptly by a methane burst right here and it still is loaded and ready to fire again.   North side of unimak island , going way out to sea.  thats where clathrates are densest too.  the methane salts out of solution when deep currents are turned north by eastern aleutians
 
Volcanoes and faults become active in January every year on Unimak --just as the earth is in sharpest decelleration from perihelion.  Safe bet is that next methane warmup will occur on JANUARY 12, near a solar max and Jan12, 2010 looks like a good bet as the big planets rise together at that lattitude at that time (extra stress -like on Sumatra, Dec 24, 2004}
  
 ***
Supertek, Kenneth Thomas with his supercomputer further predicts that after precipitous rises in sea level, the cycle will reverse: the South magnetic pole made landfall in 1990. Both lobes of magnetic North pole have moved out to sea. The high albedo of cold ice-covered land is necessary for glacier buildup.  The Artic Sea will soak up the sun.  Once the Northern Hemisphere warms dramatically, sea levels will drop inexorably due to immense build up of ice in Antarctica - as long as the southern magnetic pole is over land.
 
The magnetic field does not go to zero but splits into several lesser fields of varying orientation.  Sideways deflection of charged particles is also more effective than magnetic poles which act as funnels. 
 
Low pressure follows magnetic gradient.  Entire ice cap of previous ice age grew from two nuclei corresponding to bi-lobed north mag pole which were over LAND in northern Canada.
 
Total surface area of oceans governs beginning of ice age. Continental mass at one or other pole is essential (glaciers begin on land under the magnetic poles)  If both poles are near or over land mass the ice grows from both poles. South magnetic pole presently is moving toward land.  North magnetic pole(s) moving toward water.
 
Thomas concludes, against popular wisdom, that based on solar output, if it were NOT for human global warming, we would now be heading into a new Dalton Minimum as preamble to an ice age of 80,000 years.  While this may have been a boon, it is still time to take our foot off the accelerator.
 
METHANE SCENARIO:
 
Action reaction: the zipper of the seismic gap along aleutians advanced to unimakafter 1946 tsunami/quake.  Methane burp from north side would likely coincide with quake on south side with tsunami.  There would be ample warning from GRADUAL, STEADY increase in seismic activity in area of 165w,  55n- so there is no reason that anybody should be taken by surprise.  The seismic activity already seems to be rising.  False pass on Unimak Island, population 64, would feel the tremors.
 
The biggest volcano is way too small to act as a trigger; it has to be a 7.0 or greater quake.
 
In the worst case, most of Japan and California/Oregon/Washington cost would be wiped out by super-tsunami (they occur mainly in January, an effect of earths downshifting after perihelion).
Details arent knowable now but by 2010  they should be.  It won't take much persuasion to evacuate if that becomes indicated.
 
 
 
The head of the bering canyon , at unimak island undercut the alaskan shelf and distributes it via a redirected oceanic current to the northwest where the sediments derived have been generating clathrate mushrooms for 26 million years.
 
A mild warming , an undersea volcano , a quake can complete the seismic gap and allow subducted plate to jump north, which would create a tsunami to the south (one of the fairly recent ones is the all time record -524 ft in height, about a million years ago)  and an unzipping of the clathrate deposits to the northwest.
 
Per greenhouse effect, this would be = to all fuels burnt by humans to date.
 
the oceanic current is steadily warming by interaction with shelf current near unimak island. 
 
 

600 Million Years Ago Methane Release:

 
 
".. greater than the equivalent of instantaneously burning all the oil reserves on Earth. .."
 
 
the reason the slide that presumably caused the 1946 tsunami cannot be found is that its on the reverse side of unimak island from the epicenter of the quake which , in consequence, would have had to be caused by a flexure of the subducting plate.  these are both rigid, dense oceanic plates!  this is not oceanic vs continental as per normal.
 
from the clathrate gun, the pacific funnels outward ACROSS the equator {get a globe. study it every day, keep it on your desk--forsake maps; theyre useless}
 
you can predict a soliton tsunami of alittle under 600 ft in height which will not dissipate before it hits the NE coast of australia and inundates the 4 largest cities which amount to half the total population.
 
likewise california oregon washington state; likewise japan; likewise mainland chinas economic engine, taiwan, singapore, etc.
 
the australian continent is basically a dried mud flat; the mountains look high because they rise from zero elevation, but only a few peaks are above 1500 ft.  everything else is well below 600 ft.
It is time to search the brushy hills above Brisbane and Sidney for the last two bathtub rings - 1 million bc and about 20 million bc.  aus is geologically stable so the elevation can be prescribed--500 feet.
 
Maps show large clathrate deposits on each side of Unimak Island.
Nowhere else in the world does this arrangement exist.
 
The water south of Unimak is thousands of meters deep and clathrates there would have to be from upwelling of super hot super pressure steam -- methane, chlorine from between the plates.
 

What's New with My Subject?

THE PROMISE
A research and development project in Japan is aiming for commercial-scale extraction by 2016.[14] In August of 2006, China announced plans to spend 800 million yuan (US$100 million) over the next 10 years to study natural gas hydrates.[15] A potentially economic reserve in the Gulf of Mexico may contain ~1010 m3 of gas
On the shelf above the southeast head of bering canyon, about 2 miles east of the lip should be a sizable, relic outcrop  of clathrate in shallow water about 90 meters.  the water temp is too warm to form the ice but is adequate for them to persist.  it should be easily detectable by sonar due to very large echo.
Under special conditions, which may never occur, that huge fizzy ice blob could be the trigger that unzips the clathrate fanning out to the north and west for hundreds of miles resulting in the much discussed global climate catastrophe by methane burst.
It is best to be rid of this cosmic trigger, especially since it is a potentially viable fuel source that could be lucrative.

Anomalies caused by ancient event

By KEVIN HOWE
Herald Staff Writer

Global warming is nothing new.

It ended the last great ice age 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and the effects of that warming are still being felt today, according to ocean geologists with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.

Geologists Charles Paull and William Ussler spent the late summer and early fall of 2003 aboard a Canadian icebreaker plying the Beaufort Sea off Canada's north coast to examine a geological anomaly, "pingo-like" objects on the sea floor similar to rounded hill formations called pingos that are found on the surface in the arctic ice.

Their findings, published last month in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters, indicate the objects are being pushed up by methane gas released after long-buried gas hydrates -- icelike deposits of methane that occur under extremely cold conditions -- began decomposing when the melting polar ice cap caused sea levels to rise and inundate the continental shelves.

Over the ensuing millennia, Paull said, the warmer water -- close to freezing but about 20 degrees Celsius warmer than the gas hydrates -- sent a heat pulse downward and began thawing the gas.

"There's a lot of interest in the scientific community about gas hydrates," he said. "These are compounds that most people have never seen, and yet we argue they're common on earth and may be a very important compound on earth.

"Humans and gas hydrates are incompatible. We die under the conditions they form in. They decompose quickly. It comes as an eye-opener; it may be a very important phase on earth we just haven't experienced."

Chemists in the late 1800s theorized that gas hydrates may exist, Paull said, and they were observed in pipelines in the 1930s, but weren't discovered in nature until the 1960s.

Gas hydrates are distinct from the more familiar liquid hydrocarbons found in oil fields, Ussler said. "It's a relatively new material, found on the ocean floor, primarily methane."

The two scientists said there are several practical areas of interest involving the gas hydrocarbons:

• Methane is a greenhouse gas that could contribute to global warming, and gas hydrates are found worldwide, not just in the arctic. While release of methane began with the end of the ice age, scientists wonder if current global warming might accelerate the process. That would have the effect of increasing global warming, Ussler said, "a process of positive feedback; it builds on itself and goes faster.

"The downside is that there's really not much we can do about it. The train has left the station in terms of momentum and we can't stop the propagation of the thermal pulse down into seafloor, but knowing what the outcome might be makes things a little less pleasant." Climate scientists, Ussler said, predict the permanent loss of arctic ice over the next century.

• Gas hydrates are found worldwide. In addition to those found under permafrost in the polar regions, Ussler said, they have been found on the west and east coast of United States, in the Gulf of Mexico and in the Mediterranean.

"Almost everywhere we've looked and had the tools to observe and detect them, we've found them. The more we explore, the more we realize how extensive they are."

• Decomposing gas hydrate deposits could make the sediments in the continental shelf areas where offshore oil drilling rigs operate unstable, Paull said, and threaten these installations.

• As a potential source of fuel, methane is a clean-burning gas that produces carbon dioxide on combustion, a gas absorbed by plants which convert it to oxygen. At present, Ussler said, the cost of extracting it profitably is probably too high for the energy industry.

Paull noted, however, that the United States, Canada, Japan, Korea and India have programs exploring whether they can become a long-term energy source.

"...
San Miguel and his colleagues calculated that if carbon clathrate could be produced, its bulk modulus would be surpassed only by diamond; and if combined with some impurity atoms to fill in the voids, it might be even harder than diamond. Jean Louis Hodeau of the French National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble agrees that carbon clathrate is likely to be very hard, and he is optimistic that it can be synthesized, based on his own work creating materials made from covalently bonded carbon fullerenes. "But [now] we have to prove it," Hodeau adds.

High Pressure Behavior of Silicon Clathrates: A New Class of Low Compressibility Materials
A. San-Miguel, P. Kéghélian, X. Blase, P. Mélinon, A. Perez, J. P. Itié, A. Polian, E. Reny, C. Cros, and M. Pouchard
Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 5290
(issue of 20 December 1999) 
carbon buckeyball-type methane storage/battery/supercapacitor
presently charging pressure too high., could be remedied by carbon- boron or -silicon hybrid mole ule
in any case, raw material is dirt cheap and ingenious way to sequester carbon if it catches on
envision a stiff carbon-like sponge with micropores .  thats what the bulk material looks like although some have metallic sheen-depends on pore size.
this works i built some of these a long time ago.  methane and hydrogen work too
potential enormous leap in efficiency and the electrical generating plant is skipped.
cars tools isolated homes can also work fine on scaled up versions.  powder is shippable by railcars that handle grain{blow in pellets are one config}
methane exists in abundance in US.  transport is problem.  in this case transport and generation of electricity are solved in one step.
better clathrates are needed though.
one turns methane into premium gasoline simply by passing pressurized methane through membrane.  still too expensive though
stablization via xenon krypton argon still a vague theoretical concept but WILL be ultimate answer
to keep in mind:  methane clathrates are 75%pure distilled freshwater which will become as valuable as methane in the very very near future.
Converting Methane
the acetic acid route perfected by archeobacteria 3.5 billion years ago , before they moved into nucleated organisms to become....mitochondria
that nice non-allelgenic acrylic furniture cases etc is going to get cheaper.
 
 Cheap Gas
 

http://whyfiles.org/119nat_gas/2.html

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http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/econ/hydrates.htm

  The evanescent existence of dodecahedra in liquid water would seem to facilitate the formation of gas hydrates.

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http://www.du.edu/~jcalvert/econ/hydrates.htm

  mechanism for clathrate chain reaction is same as mjr's moab

 

but more powerful; uses chlorine hydrate, not oxygen, takes place in water layer between 2 plates--instant super pressure steam.

 

imagin a huge, huge bellows -shaped volcano laying on its side with nozzle under unimak island pointing south.  unimak behaves as part of upper plate and is mainly a marker.

 

more than enough to trigger super quake- and reliably, too.

 

you wind up with a pool of atomic hydrogen combining with atomic chlorine

 

the most powerful chemical exxplosive known.

the aptly named HAL came up with the specific info that removing a
PREVIOUSLY UNKNOWN massive hydrate deposit at 165w 55n would delay the
chain reaction methanogenesis that is the climate trigger.
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interrogating HAL , he reluctantly spit out a 1981 doc from a 
BIOLOGICAL
survey which was wrongly thought to map a huge colony of methane
producing organisms but in fact mapped a relic deposit of clathrate
which is about to slide off the alaska shelf in an area that generated
the 1946 mega-tsunami.....at 165w 55n near unimak island in the
aleutians.

<!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16471893&dopt=Abstract

Gas hydrates of argon and methane synthesized at high pressures: composition, thermal expansion, and self-preservation.

Nikolaev Institute of Inorganic Chemistry SB RAS, Prospekt Akad. Lavrentieva 3, Novosibirsk 630090, Russian Federation.

For the first time, the compositions of argon and methane high-pressure gas hydrates have been directly determined. The studied samples of the gas hydrates were prepared under high-pressure conditions and quenched at 77 K. The composition of the argon hydrate (structure H, stable at 460-770 MPa) was found to be Ar.(3.27 +/- 0.17)H(2)O. This result shows a good agreement with the refinement of the argon hydrate structure using neutron powder diffraction data and helps to rationalize the evolution of hydrate structures in the Ar-H(2)O system at high pressures. The quenched argon hydrate was found to dissociate in two steps. The first step (170-190 K) corresponds to a partial dissociation of the hydrate and the self-preservation of a residual part of the hydrate with an ice cover. Presumably, significant amounts of ice Ic form at this stage. The second step (210-230 K) corresponds to the dissociation of the residual part of the hydrate. The composition of the methane hydrate (cubic structure I, stable up to 620 MPa) was found to be CH(4).5.76H(2)O. Temperature dependence of the unit cell parameters for both hydrates has been also studied. Calculated from these results, the thermal expansivities for the structure H argon hydrate are alpha(a) = 76.6 K(-1) and alpha(c) = 77.4 K(-1) (in the 100-250 K temperature range) and for the cubic structure I methane hydrate are alpha(a) = 32.2 K(-1), alpha(a) = 53.0 K(-1), and alpha(a) = 73.5 K(-1) at 100, 150, and 200 K, respectively.

PMID: 16471893 [PubMed - in process]

 
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Telluric Currents
the place where the current either breaks into the continent or continues north through the bering strait is near grants pass, oregon and is probably responsible for the local magnetic anomalies.
it may be possible to find a natural parametric amplier between two ordinary test wells drilled as far apart as possible in oregon.
if so, precision control of bering currents, seismic phenomena, weather and pinpoint accurate release of clathrate bundles on demand may be possible.
 
Undersea Arctic methane could wreak havoc on climate
   
The sea surface above the East Siberian Ice Shelf is full of ice and bubbles,. Sonar is the only way to detect the vast clouds of methane bubbles rising from the seafloor.  
Enlarge image Enlarge By Igor Semiletov, University of Alaska Fairbanks
The sea surface above the East Siberian Ice Shelf is full of ice and bubbles,. Sonar is the only way to detect the vast clouds of methane bubbles rising from the seafloor.
 METHANE MENACE
By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
It lurks beneath the sea.

No, not The Blob, but something perhaps far more sinister: methane, a potent greenhouse gas 30 times better than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat.

Research released Thursday finds that underground methane appears to be seeping through the Arctic Ocean floor and into the Earth's atmosphere, thanks to a weakening of the protective layer of permafrost at the bottom of the ocean. Once released into the atmosphere, methane could wreak havoc with the world's climate.

Although scientists have known about the methane under the Arctic— and its potential for leakage — since the 1990s, the study is the first to document it to this degree.

"The release to the atmosphere of only 1% of the methane assumed to be stored in shallow hydrate deposits" could increase the level of atmospheric methane worldwide by three or four times, says the study's lead author, Natalia Shakhova, a researcher at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. That could trigger abrupt climate warming, the authors report. But the specific climate consequences are hard to predict, they say.

The researchers studied the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, a section of the Arctic Ocean just north of Siberia.

Historically, methane concentrations in the world's atmosphere have ranged between 0.3 and 0.4 parts per million in cool periods to 0.6 to 0.7 in warm periods. Current methane concentrations in the Arctic average about 1.85 parts per million, the scientists said, the highest in 400,000 years.

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," Shakhova says. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

Permafrost, which occurs throughout the Arctic, is a layer of soil or rock at which the temperature has been continuously below 32 degrees for at least several years, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Methane is released when organic material in the thawing permafrost decomposes, which gradually releases methane. It also can be released directly as stored methane already in the permafrost is released as it thaws.

Why is the permafrost failing? According to the study, the process occurs naturally over thousands of years but is being accelerated by man-made climate warming. "Sustained release of methane to the atmosphere from thawing Arctic permafrost is a likely positive feedback to climate warming," the authors write in the study, which appears in the new edition of the journal Science.

The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, in addition to holding large stores of frozen methane, is an additional concern because it is so shallow. In deep water, methane gas oxidizes into carbon dioxide before it reaches the surface. In the shallow East Siberian Arctic Shelf, methane simply doesn't have enough time to oxidize, which means more of it escapes into the atmosphere.

This is a new topic, Shakhova concedes, and the findings are only a starting point for further study.

"We're at the very beginning of studying this topic," Shakhova says. "This has never been incorporated into climate models."

Contributing: Associated Press