Courtesy the University of California, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and U.S. Department of Energy. U.S. Department of Energy The Glomar Challenger, built in the 1960s, was the first research ship to take core samples from the deep ocean floor. Everybody knows about gases, liquids and solids. A fourth state, plasma, consists of electrically charged particles and is found in fluorescent lights and the sun. A fifth state of matter, the recently discovered Bose-Einstein condensate , exists near absolute zero.
Gas hydrates contain a matrix of frozen water surrounding molecules of natural gas.
Their molecules vibrate more slowly, and since vibration is what causes fluids to flow and take the shape of their container rather than act like a solid block of ice or table salt, the removal of thermal energy allows most fluids to freeze into a crystalline structure. Think about the transition from liquid to gas. Because boiling takes place at a lower temperature at high altitude, you must boil food longer than usual. More on temperature-pressure relationships regarding hydrates. Gas hydrate depends on cold conditions, and the lower boundary of a deposit is determined by the steady increase in temperature with depth - caused by the extreme temperatures inside the Earth.