Researchers from the Tyumen region have an original explanation to the mystery surrounding the Bermuda Triangle. Their idea has been outlined at a conference on the theme well away from the subject, entitled Geology and wealth in oil and gas basin of Western Siberia. The scientists explains that, if planes and boats have disappeared, the reason may be they would have met with tremendous outbursts of gas hydrates.

“In the bottom of the Atlantic, in the region of the Bahamas, Florida and Bermuda, huge amounts of concentrated gas hydrates are present”, says Anatoly Nesterov, deputy director of the Institute of the Cryosphere Earth, Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences. When it produces ground movements, tectonic fractures are formed and gas hydrates begin to break up..

It emerges when large quantities of gas, mixed with water, lower the surrounding density. If a ship enters this environment, it meet the water Archimedes’ thrust which is much lower and it sinks. The same destructive effect occurs when an airplane is caught in a cloud of methane, formed by the release of this gas in the atmosphere. The lift of the wings is suddenly reduced and the aircraft crashes.

This hypothesis of Anatoly Nesterov, is not scientifically proven. But the presence of clusters of gas hydrates in the waters of the Atlantic was confirmed by the U.S. program of drilling at great depths in the mid-1980s. Hydrates are solid combinations that form from methane and water under certain conditions of temperature and pressure. They occur mainly in the oceans and the northern regions of permafrost. These outbursts of gas hydrates could also be a source of sudden warming of the atmosphere, methane being a powerful gas with greenhouse effect.

An unexploited reserves of fossil energy

Natural Hydrates which contains methane, were discovered in the USSR. In 1965, Yuri Magakon, a young researcher at the GOUBIN University had mentioned the possibility of the existence of gas hydrate in nature. A year and a half later the deposit was discovered in Messoyarskoyé beyond the Arctic Circle. Until the mid-1980s, a study of gas hydrates was conducted in the USSR. Specialists now believe that the reserves of gas hydrates in natural gas are higher by at least a hundred times to those explored in the traditional gas fields. More than 220 deposits of gas hydrates have been discovered. Later they could replace natural gas reserves.

Unravelling the mystery of a plane wreckage in the Bermuda Triangle