Natural gas hydrates: searching for the long-term climatic and slope-stability records

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Abstract
The recent revival of interest in gas hydrates has grown from the awareness that they may play significant roles in several global and regional processes, including global carbon recycling, rapid climate change through emission of methane from marine sediments into the atmosphere, and as a cause for massive transport of sediments and structural changes on the continental slope. Their estimated large volumes are also considered to be a potential resource for future exploitation. Here the long-term record of gas hydrate behaviour is examined in terms of climatic, oceanographic, stratigraphic and slope-stability changes of the past. Various intriguing hypotheses recently offered to explain the observed record also highlight the numerous unknowns and our relative ignorance about these widespread features of the continental margins. The paper identifies some of these gaps and poses several relevant questions that will need to be answered before we can appreciate their full potential and cause-effect relationship of hydrate dissociation with climate change and slope stability.