What are gas hydrates?
Gas hydrates are a crystalline solid formed of water and gas. It looks and acts much like ice, but it contains huge amounts of methane; it is known to occur on every continent; and it exists in huge quantities in marine sediments in a layer several hundred meters thick directly below the sea floor and in association with permafrost in the Arctic. It is not stable at normal sea-level pressures and temperatures, which is the primary reason that it is a challenge to study.
Gas hydrates are important for three reasons:
- They may contain a major energy resource
- It may be a significant hazard because it alters sea floor sediment stability, influencing collapse and landsliding
- The hydrate reservoir may have strong influence on the environment and climate, because methane is a significant greenhouse gas.
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Gas Hydrate Schematic
Summary of the locations where gas hydrate occurs beneath the seafloor, in permafrost areas, and beneath some ice sheets, along with the processes (shown in red) that destroy methane (sinks) in the sediments, ocean, and atmosphere. The differently colored circles denote different sources of methane. Gas hydrates are likely breaking down now on shallow continental
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Gas hydrate (white, ice-like material) under authigenic carbonate rock that is encrusted with deep-sea chemosynthetic mussels and other organisms on the seafloor of the northern Gulf of Mexico at 966 m (~3170 ft) water depth. Although gas hydrate that forms on the seafloor is not an important component of the global gas hydrate inventory, deposits such as these
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Gas Hydrates in Marine Sediments off the Oregon Coast
During Ocean Drilling Program Leg 204, nine sites were cored and wireline logged on the Oregon continental margin to determine the distribution and concentration of gas hydrates in an accretionary ridge setting, investigate the mechanisms that transport methane and other gases into the gas hydrate stability zone, and obtain constraints on physical properties of gas
...
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