fire and ice
Two posts in one day? What?
I just can't help myself.
Mainly because of this.
That, my friends, is ice. Ice on fire. aka pure delight.
Methane clathrate is the explanation for this. It's methane gas surrounded by frozen water molecules. When the ice reaches room temp and begins to melt, the gas is released. Wave a match over it and FOOM! Flame. Originally considered not much more than a scientific oddity, sometime a couple decades ago they found an abundance of it beneath the Arctic Ocean. As in, there is at least 2x more than all available fossil fuels in the world - and that is a conservative estimate.
The challenge, of course, is to harness this energy without doing damage to the ecosystem around it. This is tricky. First of all, harvesting it is ridiculously difficult. The gas is emitted from mud volcanoes deep beneath the ocean, for one, which makes capturing it very difficult. A couple months ago they (being the Canadians and the Japanese) sent a research team up to northernmost Canada somewhere to attempt drilling for it near the ocean, but on land; previous attempts had failed because too much sediment had been mixed in. I'm not sure how that worked out, but neither I nor my professor's seen anything on it.
What's really neat is that this methane is produced by tiiiny little microbes, which reduce carbon dioxide (fix hydrogen to it) to make methane. These are the same little microbes that live in our intestines and make us flatulate.
Another concerning aspect of this delightful oddity of nature is its effect on climate change. If the methane were ever to escape and get into the atmosphere... well, you think we should be worried about carbon dioxide? Hah. Now, whether this will happen or not, I don't have the knowledge; here's the outline of possibilities, though.
The ocean is heavy. Obviously. The hydrostatic pressure of all this water will ensure the methane clathrate won't ever be released into the atmosphere, seeing as it's trapped. (the same concept can be applied to the mc that is burried under land.) Except the other variable here is temperature; if it gets warm enough and enough ice melts then it is possible the methane will be released anyways. This is good news for the little polychaete ice worms that subsist by fixing the methane gas to oxygen to create organic matter for themselves. It is bad news for us. However, with rising temperatures comes rising ocean levels; more water means more weight pressing down on the methane clathrate. I'm sure there is a neat graph depicting where the two curves intersect, but I don't know where it is. It'd be interesting to see, though.
In conclusion, though. It's burning ice. That's all that's really important.