Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a world-killing event - by Terrence Aym - Helium

[polaris93]

http://www.helium.com/items/1882339-doomsday-how-bp-gulf-disaster-may-have-triggered-a-world-killing-event

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the

Comments

[mauser]

Maybe what we need is to tap that gas pocket and burn it for energy, like lancing a boil.

[polaris93]

If it's possible, oh, yes, indeed! The thing is, I have no idea how stable the ceiling of that pocket is, or what is likely to happen if they drill into it to try to draw it off. If BP isn't part of such an operation, well, maybe they could do that, but I wouldn't let BP get within ten thousand miles of it, at this point -- you know what would happen if they tried it!

It's possible that any attempt to tap that reservoir of gases could trigger the very thing they fear. I have no idea if that's the case or not -- and with that media blackout concerning the Gulf, we're not likely to find out anytime soon.

But yeah, all that lovely methane, propane, ethane, etc. etc., just waiting for us to come along and extract it and use it to power all sorts of things -- doing that would go a long way toward getting us off dependency on foreign oil. Let's hope that can be done.

[brezhnev]

I think the Icelandic volcano might have bought us some time with the global warming issue, though of course it still needs lots of work. The problem with crystallized methane is that when the sea floor gets to a certain temperature, it's going to start bubbling up (which unfortunately has been observed) and this only makes things worse.

Fossil fuels were more or less OK in earlier times. But now that China and India are having their 1950s on our dime, it's rapidly becoming too much. In the long term, clean power will be essential. We'll need to do more with wind power, maybe nuclear pebble bed reactors, and perhaps even space-based solar arrays. Electric cars will help. As for the CO2 already out there, perhaps we could farm fast-growing trees on a large scale as a means of carbon sequestration.

[polaris93]

My money's on space-based solar arrays and nuclear power, in whatever mix is needed. Cars could run on electricity -- maybe. Or maybe someday, somehow, somebody will actually invent a nuclear-powered car using a teensy little reactor that doesn't require so much lead shielding that the car couldn't go more than about -2 miles per hour. That still won't do much to put out all those coal-mine fires around the world, unless the power can be used for chilling nitrogen down to the temperature at which it liquifies, then ramrodding it into those mines to cool them down below the point at which they can continue to burn. As for CO2 sequestration -- hmm . . . Maybe. In the meantime, we could put up shields, big and small, in space, orbiting the Sun with us, shielding us from just enough incident sunlight that it cools Earth down to just the right temperature. That's the only way to do it in a hurry. Which we need to do.