A new scientific study has confirmed that earthquakes can release methane gas from underwater.
In a new study, published online this past weekend in Nature Geoscience, researchers from Germany and Switzerland claim an underwater quake in Pakistan 70 years ago fractured seafloor sediments and formed pathways for methane.
The researchers credited cores of sediment drilled from the bed of the northern Arabian Sea during a research trip in 2007 according to AFP.com.
One of those cores has now been found to contain methane hydrates, a "solid ice-like crystalline structure of methane" and water, just 5.2 feet below the sea floor according to the study.
"We started going through the literature and found that a major earthquake had occurred close by, in 1945," said David Fischer from the MARUM Institute at the University of Bremen, who ran the study along with his colleagues, according to AFP. "Based on several indicators, we postulated that the earthquake led to a fracturing of the sediments, releasing the gas that had been trapped below the hydrates into the ocean."
The researchers listed an 8.1-magnitude quake as the reason for their discovery. The quake is the largest ever detected in the northern Arabian Sea.
Over a period of many decades, approximately 261 million cubic feet of methane, or 10 large natural-gas tankers, have reached the surface according to the study's calculations.
Methane is created by the decomposition of organic material and leaks from reservoirs under the seafloor in many locations all-over the world.
In certain conditions methane mixes with seawater to form icy compounds, which is called gas hydrates, in the top layers of sediments, according to The New York Times.
"There are probably even more sites in the area that had been affected by the earthquake," said scientists in the study.
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