They used a natural clock in the minerals created by different concentrations of argon-40 and argon-39 to date the rocks and found they were about the same age and fit well into the timing of the PETM, which has been identified independently from marine sediments.
"The dating allows us to link the (PETM) to what we see as a massive surge of volcanic activity," Storey told Discovery News. "It was an enormous surge." And it left behind more than 2 million cubic miles (10 cubic km) of basalt.
"This is almost perfect because you have that as a trigger," says paleo-oceanographer James Zachos of the University of California at Santa Cruz. "The (climate) system is just perched on the edge and you just need a little kicker."
After that kick, there’s plenty of methane hydrate to complete the process and keep warming things up, Zachos said.
Today there are estimates to be between 2,000 and 10,000 giga-tons of methane hydrate buried in cold ocean sediments. Humans currently release between six and seven giga-tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year.
The big unknown today is exactly how much carbon it takes to warm things up to the point that the methane hydrate breaks loose and takes the matter entirely out of human hands.
