Sentences with phrase «gas hydrates under»

Boulder, Colo., USA: Cretaceous climate warming led to a significant methane release from the seafloor, indicating potential for similar destabilization of gas hydrates under modern global warming.

Gargantuan stores of gas hydrates under the oceans and permafrost regions of the globe have many scientists wondering whether they can find an economically feasible way to unlock the methane, creating a natural gas supply that could last for centuries.

Not exact matches

Naturally - occurring methane hydrates, hidden deep under the sea floor or tucked under Arctic permafrost, contain substantial natural gas reserves locked up in a form that is difficult to extract.

The Arctic ocean floor hosts vast amounts of methane trapped as hydrates, which are ice - like, solid mixtures of gas and water.These hydrates are stable under high pressure and cold temperatures.

When methane hydrates «melt,» they release the methane trapped inside the ice, but because the methane was first trapped under pressure when the hydrate was formed, one cubic metre of solid methane hydrate will release 160 cubic metres of methane gas.

Under most frozen hydrate deposits is a layer of free methane gas occupying the pore spaces in the sediment.

Under some parts of Hydrate Ridge there is so much methane gas, says German geologist Gerhard Bohrman, that it is constantly bubbling up into the hydratHydrate Ridge there is so much methane gas, says German geologist Gerhard Bohrman, that it is constantly bubbling up into the hydratehydrate zone.

Gas hydrates — a mixture of ice and methane — are found only under high pressure and at cold temperatures, and they are expected to make up a significant portion of the energy mix once existing oil fields dwindle, says David Scott, manager of the Northern Resources Development Program for Natural Resources Canada.

methane hydrate Molecules of methane gas trapped — and compressed under pressure — within a lattice of water ice.

Nor do we adequately understand the relative contributions of microbes (i.e., biogenic methanogenesis), fossil sources, and the dissociation of gas hydrates (an ice - like substance formed by methane and water under pressure).

Moreover, as if discovering methane emissions from the deep seas of the Arctic isn't already of major concern, a recent study discovered immense amounts of methane locked under Antarctic ice: «They... calculated that the potential amount of methane hydrate and free methane gas beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet could be up to 4 billion metric tons, a similar order of magnitude to some estimates made for Arctic permafrost.

But under permafrost the gas hydrate may stay stable even where the pressure is not that high, because of the constantly low temperatures.»

Methane release from stores of so - called gas hydrates, that can form on land or under the sea, is not new to researchers.

The project at the University of Texas at Austin will develop conceptual and numerical models to analyze conditions under which gas will be expelled from existing marine accumulations of gas hydrate into the ocean, which could potentially have a damaging effect to the ecosystem.

The USGS, which announced the discovery, estimates there is about 700,000 tcf of gas hydrate worldwide, most of it below the ocean floors, where hydrates form under high pressure and cold temperatures.

Methane hydrates are 3D ice - lattice structures with natural gas locked inside, and are found both onshore and offshore — including under the Arctic permafrost and in ocean sediments along nearly every continental shelf in the world.