Methane Hydrate and global warming... Update on the apocalypse theme. I just read a book that takes place at and around the South Pole. It has a somewhat fantastic, overly complicated plot, but it gives the reader a picture of what it must be like to live and work in that region. One of the plot lines turns around a substance called Methane Hydrate, a mineral sometimes found under the glaciers at the South Pole. Interested, I googled the mineral just to see how much the book exaggerated climate risks posed by release of methane into the atmosphere from glacier melt. The 2005 information turned up was more alarming than the plot of the potboiler-written in 1999. Methane Hydrate is a crystalline substance composed of methane and water crystallized under pressure and cold. It's found at the presurrized cold at the bottom of oceans and glaciers, including the east coast continental shelf, and is a component of permafrost found in Canada, Russia, Alaska, China, and Antarctica. There's a lot of methane in the environment locked up in crystal form. When it "melts," one liter of Methane Hydrate forms 20 liters of methane, a greenhouse gas much more potent than Carbon Dioxide. Several scientific web sites discussed the mass extinctions at the end of the Permian Age as a result of a global warming caused by sublimation of methane hydrate into large quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Other web sites discuss how the permafrost in northern climes is rising in temperature, leading to instability and release of Methane. Another web site discusses how drilling for oil in the far northern areas may have an unsettling effect on Methane Hydrate, and could release methane. [If we could figure out a safe way to mine it, it would be the perfect fuel.] At least one website talks about release of methane hydrate as a destabilizer of the ocean floor on the coastal shelf, which could lead to an east coast Tsunami. At least one large tidal wave occurred in Norway and Greenland from a gas release. The theory is that once we warm up to a certain level, methane hydrate begins sublimating into methane, which rapidly escalates global warming, unlocking more and more methane and creating radical fast climate changes. Scientists from the Pentagon warned the Shrub about this possibility, but secure in his belief system that Jesus wouldn't want that to happen, the warning was shrugged off. Now I'm wondering why people who swallow the Left Behind fairy tale totally reject the idea that global warming may affect our civilization in some radical way because it is based on scientific extrapolations. If, as the ocean temperature levels and perma frost summer temperature levels indicate, there is a global warming effect taking place, why would a prudent world leader not take all possible steps to avoid a possible catastrophy? And why are people so prepared to accept extrapolations about the end of the world taken from the book of Revelations, but unwilling to accept in the tiniest way the possibility that continuing in our present course of fossil fuel usage could endanger civilization?
Some websites with methane hydrate information:

http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/gas-hydrates/title.html
http://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html
http://healthandenergy.com/methane_hydrate.htm
http://www7430.nrlssc.navy.mil/7432/hydrates/index.htm
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1215-24.htm