Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event

[KamalJoe]

Possible extinction of plant, animal and human life???

 

"Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions."

 

Full story

[Tony]

I don't know much about this stuff but I have a decent nose for bad journalism and cranky ideas so let's look at the report for signs of credibility

 

Ominous reports are leaking past the BP Gulf salvage operation news blackout that the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico may be about to reach biblical proportions.

 

251 million years ago a mammoth undersea methane bubble caused massive explosions, poisoned the atmosphere and destroyed more than 96 percent of all life on Earth. [1] Experts agree that what is known as the Permian extinction event was the greatest mass extinction event in the history of the world. [2]

 

First, apparently there is a 'news blackout'. I don't think so.

 

Since the major plank of its argument is an under sea 'methane bubble' extrapolated into an extinction we can't give the report any real credibility since that is only a theory along with meteor impacts, volcano activity, massive forest fires, alien disease... take your pick since experts certainly don't 'agree'.

 

It didn't kill '96% of all life on earth' either.

 

Hopefully a drilling engineer will be along shortly to tell us about the likelihood of a 'methane bubble' forming at all from the leaking Gulf well, still less one capable of an extinction event.

[Vague_Boy]

On the other side of the story:

 

Methane bubble "doomsday" story debunked

 

For several days, bloggers and journalists have been passing around a news story about how the BP oil disaster will unleash a "giant methane bubble" and initiate a mass extinction. Yes, it's a myth. And we've busted it.

 

In this article, called "Doomsday: How BP Gulf disaster may have triggered a 'world-killing' event," a guy named Terrence Aym takes some information he got from a "Mega Disasters" TV special on undersea methane bubbles and mixes it with comments about how there are "giant rifts" beneath the sea and an "information blackout." He proposes that a "twenty mile methane bubble" dislodged by the BP oil disaster will erupt from the ocean floor, causing tidal waves and giant explosions. The sad part about all this is that news organizations and blogs took the story seriously.

 

While it's true that there are methane bubbles (and methane ice) beneath the ocean floor, they are not about to erupt from Gulf and destroy all life on Earth. This morning I spoke with two Earth scientists, Dave Valentine of UC Santa Barbara and Chris Reddy of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, who study methane and oil seeps from the sea floor. Valentine has just been out to the Gulf to study the methane levels there, and told io9:

 

During our recent cruise to the Gulf we observed significantly elevated levels of methane at water depth greater than 2500 feet, in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon spill site. While the total quantity of methane and other hydrocarbons is enough to cause problems with the regional ecosystem, there is no plausible scenario by which this event alone will cause global-scale extinctions.

 

Another fishy fact in the methane bubble doomsday story is Aym's description of how methane bubbles are what caused the End Permian mass extinction event 250 million years ago - a mass extinction that I wrote about recently, here. Many scientists do believe that atmospheric changes and ocean anoxia (de-oxygenization) were to blame for that extinction - but even Gregory Ryskin, the scientist whose highly speculative work is cited in the article, doesn't try to claim this as the sole cause, nor does he believe that one bubble of methane could bring down the biosphere instantly. The End Permian extinction took millennia to happen.

 

So the BP oil spill isn't going to end the world - it's just going to kill a lot of ocean life. And already-existing methane seeps may be doing slow, deadly damage to our climate. All this makes it even more obvious that we need to invest in alternate forms of energy. But who wants to hear difficult, complicated pieces of information, when we could just be screaming about doomsday?

 

LINK

 

So even if we are going to be wiped out by methane, it will take a few thousand years. Best to keep paying into that pension plan.

[hard2miss]

They are saying that theres a leak from the sea bed now its capped but they don't know if its oil or natural gas...

 

 

Now if this was a real threat then they would I'm sure be considering dropping a nuke down one of the relief wells and have it go off deep under the sea bed and collapsing the lot, sealing it all.

 

Maybe that is plan B anyhow and why there is an exclusion zone ?

[[Matt]]

On the other side of the story:

 

 

 

LINK

 

So even if we are going to be wiped out by methane, it will take a few thousand years. Best to keep paying into that pension plan.

I should add to your comment and link that methane leakage from the seafloor is also a natural phenomena that also occurs globally at a slow and steady pace anyhow.