“The first time a ship drilled into a pocket was in 1970. Nothing happened, but drillers were afraid for years afterward that they'd get blown out of the water. Eventually, a few experimental bores showed that research drilling was safe. Getting hydrates to the surface to heat your home or run your SUV is another question. The environment is extremely hostile in the deep water where hydrates are found, and the stuff simply fizzes when we bring it up. The deposits may be another few hundred feet below the seafloor."

"That sounds like a tough neighborhood for rigs to operate in.”

“Absolutely. A number of countries and companies are working on the problem, though. One method is pumping steam or water down the drill hole. This melts the hydrate and releases methane. Then you pump the methane to the surface of the seafloor through another drill hole. Next comes the question of what you do with it. When you remove the hydrate, the seafloor destabilizes.”

“There goes your expensive pipeline.”

“A good possibility. Which is why engineers have come up with a scheme to put a production facility on the seafloor. You pump the hydrate out and combine it with water. The mix goes into big tanks shaped like dirigibles. Submarines would tow them to the shallows, where the hydrates would be safely broken down into fuel and water."

“With any of those methods, it sounds like mining hydrates is going to be like walking on eggshells.”

“Even more difficult. Now back to your original question.”

“About hydrates as a source of earthquakes and big waves.”

“It's highly possible. There is evidence that the natural melting has destabilized seafloor slopes. They've found massive submarine landslides off the U.S. East Coast, Alaska and other countries. The Russians found unstable hydrate fields off Norway. They think one of the biggest releases ever recorded caused the Storrega submarine landslide: Eight thousand years ago, more than a thousand cubic miles of sediments slid for miles down the slope of the Norwegian continental slope.”

“I' m acquainted with Storrega,” Jenkins said. “Then you'd know that the huge mud slide caused unimaginable tsunamis. The Grand Banks and Rocky Point would have been bathtub waves by comparison.”

Jenkins nodded. “What about man-made landslides. Possible?”

“I'd say they're plausible, sure. A drilling platform inadvertently cause a deposit to collapse, triggering a landslide.”

Jenkins held his breath, then released it. “Inadvertently, yes. But could something like that be triggered deliberately?”

The tone grabbed their attention. Reed said, “What are you saying, Dr. Jenkins?”

Jenkins squirmed in his chair. “It's been driving me crazy. My gut instinct has been in conflict with my scientific training, which says gather all the evidence before coming to a conclusion, especially one as wild as this.”

Reed scratched his chin. “Maybe, but as a scientist, I'm like you - I can't make that leap from conjecture to conclusion without a bridge of facts.”