To calm you all down about the clatharate gun here is this "There is at the present, to my knowledge, no consensus on the immediacy of a "smoking" global & catastrophic clathrate gun. I believe it is worth quoting at length the conclusion of the following recent study (Ruppel, C. D. (2011) Methane Hydrates and Contemporary Climate Change. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):29): Catastrophic, widespread dissociation of methane gas hydrates will not be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates (0.2ºC per decade; IPCC 2007) over timescales of a few hundred years. Most of Earth's gas hydrates occur at low saturations and in sediments at such great depths below the seafloor or onshore permafrost that they will barely be affected by warming over even 103 yr. Even when CH4 is liberated from gas hydrates, oxidative and physical processes may greatly reduce the amount that reaches the atmosphere as CH4. The CO2 produced by oxidation of CH4 released from dissociating gas hydrates will likely have a greater impact on the Earth system (e.g., on ocean chemistry and atmospheric CO2 concentrations; Archer et al. 2009) than will the CH4 that remains after passing through various sinks. That being said, it appears that there might indeed be a localized increase in clathrate destabilisation in some specific settings such as the relatively shallow Arctic continental shelves (Op. cit.), but the rate and actual scale of this phenomenon, as well as what actually happens to the released gasses (does it remain in solution? does it get degraded by microbes?), remains to be determined". Gargatua13013
To calm you all down about the clatharate gun here is this "There is at the present, to my knowledge, no consensus on the immediacy of a "smoking" global & catastrophic clathrate gun. I believe it is worth quoting at length the conclusion of the following recent study (Ruppel, C. D. (2011) Methane Hydrates and Contemporary Climate Change. Nature Education Knowledge 3(10):29): Catastrophic, widespread dissociation of methane gas hydrates will not be triggered by continued climate warming at contemporary rates (0.2ºC per decade; IPCC 2007) over timescales of a few hundred years. Most of Earth's gas hydrates occur at low saturations and in sediments at such great depths below the seafloor or onshore permafrost that they will barely be affected by warming over even 103 yr. Even when CH4 is liberated from gas hydrates, oxidative and physical processes may greatly reduce the amount that reaches the atmosphere as CH4. The CO2 produced by oxidation of CH4 released from dissociating gas hydrates will likely have a greater impact on the Earth system (e.g., on ocean chemistry and atmospheric CO2 concentrations; Archer et al. 2009) than will the CH4 that remains after passing through various sinks. That being said, it appears that there might indeed be a localized increase in clathrate destabilisation in some specific settings such as the relatively shallow Arctic continental shelves (Op. cit.), but the rate and actual scale of this phenomenon, as well as what actually happens to the released gasses (does it remain in solution? does it get degraded by microbes?), remains to be determined". Gargatua13013