This weakens seafloor sediment resulting in sudden slumping possibly triggering tsunamis. The methane released into the atmosphere is thought to contribute to greenhouse warming, he said. It looks remarkably like ice, yet it burns when ignited. Until recently, the natural gas and petroleum industries considered it a nuisance something that occasionally plugs up pipelines and causes a headache for drilling operators. But increasingly geologists believe that gas hydrates may be a major energy source in the 21st century, and governments are beefing up research programmes to evaluate its potential.
Gas hydrate deposits occur under the ocean floor worldwide, particularly in cooler latitudes.
It is an ice-like material made up of water and highly concentrated methane. With some geologists predicting that oil supplies will start to dwindle in the next 15 years, the prospect of vast new fossil fuel deposits has fired the imagination of energy experts. According to some estimates, the energy locked up in gas hydrates amounts to more than twice the global reserves of all conventional gas, oil, and coal deposits combined. As Richard Monastersky points out in Science News Online, no-one has yet been able to show that extracting natural gas out of gas hydrate deposits is commercially viable. While hydrates are abundant worldwide, scientists are unsure what percentage of deposits occur in commercially extractable concentrations.