How much damage could a methane clathrate (hydrate) cause?
The clathrate gun hypothesis is the popular name given to the hypothesis that rises in sea temperatures (and/or falls in sea level) can trigger the sudden release of methane from methane clathrate compounds buried in the seabeds and their permafrost, which because the methane itself is a powerful greenhouse gas, in turn causes further temperature rise and further methane clathrate destabilization – in effect initiating a runaway process, as irreversible once started as the firing of a gun. In its original form, the hypothesis proposed that the “clathrate gun” could cause abrupt runaway warming in a timescale less than a human lifetime, and might be responsible for warming events in and at the end of the last ice age. This is now thought unlikely. However there is stronger evidence that runaway methane clathrate breakdown may have caused drastic alteration of the ocean environment and the atmosphere of earth on a number of occasions in the past, over timescales of tens of thousands of y
