In a message dated 1/19/01 5:40:50 AM, asa@nada.kth.se writes:
>I liked Mother of Storms precisely because this quite logical chain of
>meterological reasoning (otherwise, far too much sex and violence but
>satisfactory amounts of singularity :-) However, I'm not certain his
>whole extrapolation holds - if just one part of the chain (like the
>size increase of the hurricane spawing zones) doesn't hold the rest
>doesn't happen, which I guess is a boring but likely guess.
Methane release from clathrates has been seriously suggested as a possible
cause of mass extinction in the past. It would greatly warm the atmosphere
and cause various big climate shifts. I recall an article in Discover about
ten years ago (?) which talked about "superhurricanes". It concluded
"superhurricanes" could occur, but at a water temerature about 120F.
I don't think methane release makes it that hot. Hurricanes would become
larger and more common, though.
One somewhat wild and amusing suggestion is in relation to the "Bermuda
Triangle" (which encompasses the entire ocean; there are ships alleged to
have gone done in the Triangle which disappeared in the Pacific :-)
Landslides can cause clathrate release, which will manifest as BIG bubbles.
A ship misfortunate enough to be over such a release will be sunk by the
turbulence within seconds. There is a tendency for such mysterious
disappearances to occur near continental shelves (or so claimed the
program, anyway), and that's where you would see mass clathrate release.
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