Will human life be wiped out by a BP-induced methane eruption? No.
 July
15, 2010: Let's just get this out of the way now: The BP oil
disaster, while horrible in innumerable ways, is not literally the end of
the world.
If you've spent any considerable length of time on the Internet lately —
and not just its dark conspiratorial alleys — you may have run across a
number of geological reports that read like the plot of a Jerry
Bruckheimer movie: BP may have haphazardly tapped into a violent reservoir
of methane gas deep below Earth's surface, possibly setting off a chain of
events that could lead to release of a "methane mega-bubble" capable of
triggering floods of biblical proportions and emitting poisons into the
atmosphere, effectively wiping humans off the face of the Earth.
You're now probably wondering if it's time to start frantically compiling
a bucket list of things to do before we're all killed off by a methane
eruption. However, according to an expert interviewed by Yahoo! News, such
doomsday predictions are "extreme" and highly unlikely to take place.
“I wouldn't believe that at all," Gregory Stone, director of the Louisiana
State University Coastal Studies Institute, told us. "There's a lot of
press out there in regards to this event that is just inaccurate. We've
got some of the best scientists in the world here, and we're not concerned
about that scenario at all."
Another prominent scientist we contacted thought that the reports were
such hogwash that he declined to even offer a comment to refute them.
 So what's the root of all these apocalyptic scenarios that some news
sources have given credence to? Well, most of them seem to trace back to a
single scientist, Gregory Ryskin, an associate professor of chemical
engineering at Northwestern University. Ryskin published a paper in 2003
titled "Methane-driven oceanic eruptions and mass extinctions" in which he
theorized that "mass extinction can be caused by an extremely fast,
explosive release of dissolved methane," an eruption that would release
"deep anoxic waters that cause extinctions in the marine realm," with
extinctions on land brought about by "explosions and conflagrations that
follow the massive release of methane" and by "eruption-triggered floods."
In other words, we could all die from a massive earth fart.
[Photos: Tar balls hit Texas beaches]
There has been an influx of methane into the Gulf since the explosion of
the oil rig, but no data suggest that it is the precursor to such a
cataclysm. Certainly, the release of methane gas into the Gulf is cause
for concern. As we reported a few weeks ago, credible scientific evidence
suggests that huge dead zones could result from the large quantities of
methane gas seeping from BP's busted well.
But, in the words of LSU's Dr. Stone, "there are far more important things
to be concerned about in regards to the BP spill."
By Brett Michael Dykes
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