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The Burning Ice: Will Methane Hydrate Destabilization Surprise Climate Scientists?

The clathrates are an exotic substance formed just below the bottom of the sea, due to the reaction of methane decomposing from dead organisms with water molecules trapped in coastal sediment. If you bring methane clathrate crystals rapidly to the surface for study, or even just for your own amusement, they look and feel like common ice but can be set on fire. They are quite literally ice crystals that burn. No one really knows how much of the stuff is out there. A small but real chance exists that sea floor warming induced by global climate change will melt enough of the substance to inject significant quantities of free methane gas into the atmosphere. There it acts as a greenhouse agent and is thirty times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, which gets much more attention from scientists and policy makers. So what can be done to nail this problem down? We need to figure out where the clathrates are and then use global ocean models to simulate the rate at which they are likely to hiccup. After several years of trying, our local Los Alamos climate team has justrecently managed to get an okay to begin such a project.

Clathrate destabilization is in fact a good example of the many, greatly understudied but potentially significant climate phenomena that come under the general heading of "biogeochemistry". This may be defined as the study of everything happening near the surface of the planet that is not pure physics -in other words, all the interlocking biology, geology and chemistry of the ocean. atmosphere and continents. Biogeochemistry is a field of research just about to explode at the university and agency levels. Politicians and policy makers are beginning to realize that they cannot just study environmental change on an imaginary planet where there exists one element called carbon and one greenhouse gas constructed from it called CO2. Rather, they are compelled to consider the most complex chemical and biotic system known anywhere in the universe—the Earth—which is the place we happen to call home and are currently rebuilding in a major way. Biogeochemical feedbacks will have to be understood with relative completeness if we are to accurately predict the costs of altering and managing global climate.

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