On the Phase Transitions of Methane Hydrates

One of the grad assistants, Jim, had left the mail, a thick stack of weathered, manhandled envelopes bearing the nicks and scars of U.S. Postal Service transportation, in a pile by the lab’s primary computer. The first one Tony Peitrus opened was a confirmation letter from the American Geophysical Society for an appearance at the annual AGS conference to present initial research findings. He set this aside as a “Jim job.” The second envelope would change the way Tony felt about the world. He never got around to the rest of the day’s mail. He opened the letter with his eyes diverted, still on the computer screen, lunch settling in his stomach and his dad’s advice—“grants can’t read denser than the actual science”—still irritating him, an absent mental rash. He’d often do some of his best professional thinking while playing with his daughters or making love to Gail, so he’d saved this moment all day, hoping that to idle on one quandary would somehow unlock the other. Reading over the results of the model crossstitched onto the screen in an aggressively rote black and white spreadsheet of raw, cluttered integers, his eyes tried to grasp the gist of this latest round of data without diving too deeply into the morass. There’d be time for that later, and he always found himself compelled by each data set much the way his kids might anticipate a lesser holiday, like an Easter. It wasn’t Christmas, but hell, you did get a basket full of chocolate, and he ached to tear into it. He would let the question of his vanishing NSF funds and failure thus far to secure another grant absently nag at him. As if competing for money, lab space, and computational resources at Scripps wasn’t already pain enough in the ass, he and Niko had no “charismatic megafauna” (his wife’s designation) involved. Only the maddening mystery of methane hydrate phase transitions. To him, as to any scientific board with working brain cells, the obviousness of studying deep-sea methane molecules felt like a bright red elephant walking down La Jolla Shores Drive. But explaining it to the layperson required a convoluted story, especially as to why it deserved to take money from the vanishing schools of tuna or adorable chirping dolphins. It began with the model his eyes crept over now: he and his fellow researcher, Niko, had concocted what they thought was a rather ingenious Monte Carlo simulation to predict the behavior of clathrates under changing conditions of temperature and pressure. He and Niko