Quote:
Originally Posted by renormalised
A clathrate is a mixture of water and a volatile gas, like methane, ammonia etc. They form ices where the water molecules in the ice trap molecules of the gases. The water molecules act like a cage, trapping the gas molecules inside a lattice of the water molecules.
You get a lot of methane clathrates on the ocean floor. Actually there's a significant amount of methane gas trapped in these clathrates and it's a potential fuel/energy source. It's also potentially hazardous to the climate if these things start to melt, and it doesn't take much to start the melting. They've had quite a few methane belches in the Gulf of Mexico over the years. Some have sunk ships. The most vulnerable clathrate deposits are those lying in shallow shelf seas (like the Gulf). If they sublimate, we could be in for some intense action later on so far as global warming is concerned. Methane is something like 25-40 times more effective a greenhouse gas than CO2. |
Interesting. I've read about these things and their effects.
Getting back to Titan, whilst I'd prefer to stay on the hydrocarbon/fuel tack, a 'little' diversion: Abiogenesis is the study of how life can arise from inanimate matter. Some say the chances of DNA occurring from pre-biotic chemicals are slight (& obviously never been done in the lab, either). But the chances of DNA assembling itself into self replicating proteins is even more remote, (given the specificity of 'coding' of information contained within DNA). It may be remote, but it is possible that a single chance occurrence may have happened in a single place, somewhere in the Universe.
Given the sheer size and dimensions we talk about in Astronomy, I'm starting to wonder whether it may be entirely possible, and perhaps even realistic, that this may be the way, it may have actually happened. (And the corollary to this one might also be that Earth may be that single, one place).
I'm talking purely statistically, here and yes, I'm talking about the probability of a 'fluke'.
I also recognise that this is contrary to the Standard Cosmo Model ..ie: isotropic, homogeneous, 'no special places', etc but I think this topic may fall out of the model's scope anyway. I wonder whether anyone has ever actually tried to calculate this (given its counter-intuitiveness - apart from the 'Drake Equation', that is). I've never read anything where anyone has looked at this side of the coin - its usually the other side, which I think everyone knows about.
Maybe I've been reading too much of that other thread today, huh?
Interesting.
Cheers
PS: Please - I respect all beliefs and I'm trying to just get a snapshot of the purely scientific perspective, here.