Methane Burp

From Nature:

While testing equipment off the Californian coast last month, a newly refitted research vessel stumbled across plumes of methane gas rising 1,400 metres from the sea floor.

[...]

Cruise scientist Stephen Hammond of the NOAA office in Newport, Oregon, suspects this is because ice with methane gas trapped in its crystal structure melts at the combination of pressure and temperature at that depth. Similar methane plumes have been discovered from the Oregon coast to the Black Sea, but not this large or numerous.

They don't specifically say if this methane is going into the air or if this is a global warming event (because the data is so new) but one thing people worry about with rising sea temps is the release of "methane-hydrates," which are huge pockets of methane stored in ice at the sea floor. One scenario envisions a catastrophic release (or "burp") of all that methane nearly-simultaneously that would destroy life as we know it. Think:



Except with methane instead of chlorine. And bigger.