Warming trends: telling climate stories through the courts, icy lakes teeming with life and climate change on the self-help shelf
Researchers from NYU, led by Ryan Hartman, associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, found that feather duster worms are keeping a massive sink of greenhouse gasses locked at the bottom of the ocean; if they were to proliferate out of control, they could generate enough heat to thaw or “dissociate” the ice-like cages holding the methane in place. “If the population of worms changes, the populations of bacteria change, or if for some reason what we’re doing as humans influences the lifecycle of these organisms, then it could in turn influence the stability of the hydrates,” said Hartman.