More on that methane bubble in the Gulf of Mexico
More on that methane bubble discussed in the article I linked on my blog yesterday, in the form of videos. I've tried to pick videos with minimally hysterical narrators and a maximum of useful and checkable information. There are an awful lot of videos about this on Youtube now that are totally hysterical, minimally useful, and chock-full of
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There's a problem: I don't know just how bad the Gulf situation really is, because of the damn news blackout. I mean, given my special interests, I can try Tarot readings, the I Ching, and horary astrology, but I've been a student of the sciences since I was 7 years old, and I trust scientific data far more than anything I get from divination on something like this. Some of what I've found online doesn't sound all that plausible, for various reasons, and some of what is reported contradicts other reports. But no matter what, it looks as if there's something like two hundred cubic miles of methane under extreme pressure building up underneath the Gulf of Mexico, getting ready to blow. This is apparently due to the heating caused by the outflow of oil from the rent in the floor of the Gulf caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion, which was coming out at a temperature of some 500 degrees Celsius (now that they've stopped the outflow, it's just sitting there, still that hot, heating everything around it). That heat has been melting out methane clathrates in that area that had been down there, frozen for tens of thousand of years. Rather than simply melting, the methane sublimates into gaseous form, and the gas has been building up in that area for some time. The pressure it's under is absolutely enormous. The area concerned is at least 10 miles across and a couple of miles deep, and trying to draw it off could easily end in disaster. Not drawing it off will, of course, also end in disaster. The question is, is the containment of that gas a honeycomb formation, or is most of it one big chamber with no walls in it? If it's a honeycomb formation, when -- not if, when the gas erupts through the floor of the Gulf -- it may come out a little at a time. That could still be disastrous, but nothing like what would occur should it all come out at once. So many "ifs," and I don't have enough data yet to sort them out.
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