“The embarrassing reality is we don’t have any solid confirmation that these connections are causative rather than correlative,” says Charles Paull, a marine geologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, who has studied this western Atlantic region in detail. He says that this latest work provides credible evidence that thermal changes in the oceans can destabilize hydrates.
But Mark Maslin, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, takes issue with the authors’ claim that destabilized hydrates make this area more vulnerable to slope failures — temperature changes alone won't trigger underwater landslides. "Dramatic degassing events require a change in pressure," he says.
There are other hydrate deposits around the world that deserve attention. The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, dramatic loss of sea ice and changing oceanographic conditions. Essentially, says Ruppel, it is the place undergoing the maximum amount of change and therefore the best place to study these dynamics. She is now collaborating with Hornbach to collect more data there. “Ground zero for this research is in the Arctic,” says Hornbach.