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[rhino]

question for the marine biologists. Could phytoplankton that die and sink to the bottom of the ocean be the cause of salmon and other fish dying? when the sink and decompose the sediment will compress and produce methane gas, when the gas gets compressed and start to seek out it can cause under water explosions making water toxic and killing all the fish in the area. These eruptions can be enormous!

Thoughts?

[jon5hill]

question for the marine biologists. Could phytoplankton that die and sink to the bottom of the ocean be the cause of salmon and other fish dying? when the sink and decompose the sediment will compress and produce methane gas, when the gas gets compressed and start to seek out it can cause under water explosions making water toxic and killing all the fish in the area. These eruptions can be enormous!

Thoughts?

It is a long process for sedimentation to occur, particularly the type of sedimentation strong enough to trap gas. This process is much longer than the time it takes gases to diffuse into water. This would mean that accumulation of large volumes of gas would be very rare, and furthermore pressurization of large volumes of gas caused by sedimentation would be quite unlikely. Couple this with the probability of large volumes of fish being near rare underwater accumulations of gas, and you have a highly improbable situation.

[rhino]

it is a long process but the ocean has had a lot of time to accumulate this sediment. This being said, the gas rises and if it happens close to shores the amount of fish residing in the area can be very large as these under water explosions cover a vast area with methane.

[jon5hill]

The methane explosion postulated to have whiped out 80% of life 250 million years ago by Gregory Ryskin in Feb 2000 corresponded with a sharp increase in global atmospheric temperature. Our temperature is rising gradually, so I don't think this is the case. It could very well be that fish are being killed by smaller, less catastrophic methane explosions, however they would have to be triggered by some sort of high energy impact or heat release. Since these pockets rest at the bottom of the ocean, a very large meteor, earthquake, or volcanic eruption would need to take place to ignite these pockets of gas. Our global seismic instruments are very sensitive and would likely pick up something large enough to cause a significant fish kill. It's my belief that anthropogenic influences pose a far greater threat to the survival of the oceans fishes and all life on earth than the methane deposition cycle punctuated by cataclysmic explosions that were somehow undetected by any human instruments.

[Rp3Flyfisher]

Actually, there was a show yesterday on TV about this.

There is a confirmed study of fish being killed off by this.
The program i watched was doing research in Namibia. They said that this is possible due to the mass amounts of Phytoplankton that die. With this, they produce a mass amount of gasses (Sulfur, Methane). They have shown images from space that showed a "Bloom" or explosion of these gases that was over 200 miles long alone the coast. When this happens, mass amounts of fish get trapped in these gases and die. The last time this happened there, the clean up took 2 weeks and they figured that they collected over 2 million tons of fish from the beaches.

This does seem to be a warmer water issue though, so I am not to sure if this could happen here.

Rick 

[aquapaloosa]

Related topic about West coast methane hydrate just recently discovered.
This stuff comes up looking like ice and melting like ice but it isn't melting it is turning to gas.
See story:

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17697/story.htm

[rhino]

The methane explosion postulated to have whiped out 80% of life 250 million years ago by Gregory Ryskin in Feb 2000 corresponded with a sharp increase in global atmospheric temperature. Our temperature is rising gradually, so I don't think this is the case. It could very well be that fish are being killed by smaller, less catastrophic methane explosions, however they would have to be triggered by some sort of high energy impact or heat release. Since these pockets rest at the bottom of the ocean, a very large meteor, earthquake, or volcanic eruption would need to take place to ignite these pockets of gas. Our global seismic instruments are very sensitive and would likely pick up something large enough to cause a significant fish kill. It's my belief that anthropogenic influences pose a far greater threat to the survival of the oceans fishes and all life on earth than the methane deposition cycle punctuated by cataclysmic explosions that were somehow undetected by any human instruments.

I don't believe the methane ignites in the ocean in this case. it leeks and rises but the methane makes for impossible breathing for fish.