British Geological Survey

• Main Authors: Stephen Hunter, Alan Haywood, Leeds Ls Jt, Denis Goldobin, Nikolai Brilliantov, Jeremy Levesley, Leicester Le Rh, John Rees, Peter Jackson, Chris Rochelle, Mike Lovell, Nottingham Ng Gg, Andy Ridgwell
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: methane hydrates; submarine hydrates; HadCM3; transient model; Methane hydrate
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.459.8135; http://www.leicestermath.org.uk/GeoMath/pdf-files/publ2011/2011-icgh2011Final00780.pdf

We present results from a study designed to investigate how the global methane hydrate reservoir has changed through the last glacial-interglacial cycle. Bottom water conditions are derived from a series of long-integration snapshot-type HadCM3 GCM experiments that cover the last 120 kyr. We use this dataset to drive a 1D transient hydrate model. We first evaluate the model using sensitivity experiments against a number of hydrate bearing ODP/DSDP sites. We then explore potential initial and final steady-state inventories using Pliocene and modern boundary conditions and compare to previous studies. We then investigate how the potential volume of submarine hydrate has evolved from initial Pliocene conditions through a series of pseudo glacial cycle. We find that the potential volume increases from 7.3 × 10 6 km 3 during the Pliocene to between 7.95