You mean the Tribulation.
The rapture is when their god takes them away from the suffering. I don’t want to know what they will do when that doesn’t happen.
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I doubt very much the answer is going to be ‘fucking well apologise’.
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The Pretribulationists should be a good canary in the coal mine on that account. I understand they expect the rapture first, or at least pretty darn soon after the Tribulation starts.
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From the Huffington Post article: “This part of Siberia contains deep gas fields, and it also contains a lot of small lakes, which formed between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago when the climate was warmer, Romanovsky said.” Hmmmm…
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…just like Mars, right? Balmy.
Something happens, and the cause is now consistently climate change. Folks …
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I don’t think there was an explosion at all. How many millions of tons of earth fell into a multiacre hole at one time. The 3 foot rim around the hole suggest that the mixture of what ever was in the void was rushing past the rim as the cork fell in the hole blowing out the loose debris around the perimeter. The hole was most likely made from melting ice as the planet warms. The surface water helped the collapse by leaking into crevases around the perimeter as it sunk downward under all that weight above a pocket of air. ???
An explosion would have improved matters. If the methane under there is released, we’re in for an exciting time…
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Not necessarily - my cursory research on the subject suggests that methane could spontaneously ignite under high pressure. That might explain the reports of light/smoke mentioned in the article. Right? I’m no scientist…
And those who will not recant, the auto-da-fé. It sounds as if the red have been traded for white vestments.
It’s not an engine with a catalytic converter. It’s not designed to be efficient. It’s not designed to capture unburnt hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. It’s a methane explosion that may or not involve combustion of some of the methane.
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You ain’t cheering me up, here. I don’t want to be in a John Barnes novel, dammit.
It does sound like this is a release of gas in original form, not converted by combustion - spikes of methane in the areas where the holes occurred were noted. The “smoke and flashes of light” may have been relatively small amounts of methane mixing with surface gasses during the initial release.
Methane/air mixes are required for spontaneous combustion. Several papers have been posted on the topic, because methane is of interest as a usable natural gas in many forms. Here’s a link to the abstract for one. If the two gases aren’t in the correct proportions (if there’s not enough O2) combustion won’t occur. That’s why the “Door to Hell” in the Karakum Desert just keeps burning - for over 40 years now - it’s like a bottle filled with natural gas and only the mix at the opening allows combustion. As gas escapes, it mixes with the air and keeps on burning - but nothing can reach past the neck of the really huge “bottle” to burn it all off at once.
Methane alone is stable, and is being researched by NASA, Space X, and Russia (to name just three) for use as a liquid rocket fuel in place of hydrogen which is far more instable (it’s highly reactive). All those rockets use liquid oxygen (LOX) as an oxidizer to cause combustion at high pressure. All report that they should gain significant benefits from the change in fuel.
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Dude - WTF has this got to do with anything? Step away from the bong.
You might want to read the entire discussion I was responding to - it was all about whether or not this was a true “explosion” or something more along the lines of an “eruption”.
Methane being a very stable gas makes it hard to light up accidentally, and that’s just one of the “benefits” it has as a fuel.
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If we do have a catastrophic release of methane, or rather when we have one, is it possible to burn it off in the atmosphere somehow before it can, um, kill all of us?
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It’d make a pretty big boom! Have you ever seen the Mythbusters episode where they try to duplicate the Bourne apartment explosion? In that they eventually use one tank of methane mixed at a 9% methane/air ratio (that’s the right mix) to fill a studio apartment-sized building. It successfully blew it down.
Burning probably isn’t the answer.
Here’s a good, short article about arctic carbon in permafrost, and the methane it releases. It explains that longer growing cycles in the arctic may act as a carbon sink - plants use the methane to help them grow, and that helps to balance out the altered temps. The methane gets used instead of released. It’s only in cases like these big Siberian holes where things have gone totally haywire.
The one good thing about methane is that it has a relatively short lifetime in the atmosphere compared to CO2. However, it gets turned into water vapor and CO2, so…
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Yeah, I know. How could warmer-than-average temperatures possibly have anything to do with gasses escaping from permafrost?
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