“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