New research suggests there may be a methane "time bomb" on the ocean floor threatening to catastrophically warm the climate and Canadian scientists wonder what effects this may have on people's efforts to combat global warming.

Preliminary findings from an international study suggest that significant amounts of methane gas -- a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide -- are being released from the ocean floor off Russia's north coast.

Permafrost on the ocean floor is currently holding the methane back. But the researchers, working from a ship off the Russian coast, say that the permafrost appears to be melting, causing methane gas to bubble to the surface.

Marianne Douglas, the head of the Canadian Circumpolar Institute at the University of Alberta, said this latest research raises some important questions.

"It's a time bomb because, as the permafrost thaws -- and we don't know how fast it will thaw -- it's going to slowly and maybe catastrophically at some point, release all that methane that's trapped underneath as a solid," she said.

Some scientists believe that the sudden release of methane may have been responsible for sudden spikes in global temperatures millions of years ago.

"In the geological record, there's evidence about 55 million years ago about this having happened as well in the past," Douglas said, adding a huge burst of methane warmed the temperature of the Earth by up to 6C over a 20,000 year period.

"From the geological record, they can see that this actually ended up with some extinctions of small micro-organisms and the onset of new organisms, like mammals."

Instead of losing hope over this scenario and giving up on fighting climate change, Dale Marshall, an Ottawa-based climate change policy analyst with the David Suzuki Foundation, said people should interpret this research as being another reason to combat global warming.

Scientists say polar sea ice is melting, which allows more sunlight to penetrate ocean water. That water heats up, melting the permafrost on the ocean floor that has, up until now, prevented large releases of methane.

"For the average person, it's one more piece of evidence and one more confirmation that the urgency of addressing the issue is there," Marshall said.

"This is one of the pieces of evidence that may point to the fact that we're approaching that kind of a scenario where greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere to the point where you get a cascading series of events that leads to more and more climate change that's hard to turn around at that stage."

Chris Krenz, the Arctic project manager for the international environmental group Oceana, which works to protect the world's oceans, said the research off the coast of Russia is another piece of the climate change puzzle.

"The more we study and learn about the Arctic, the more we're realizing we're close to a tipping point with our climate change system," he said from his office in Juneau, Alaska.

"This rapid warming and release of more methane is going to warm the global climate and that's going to have effects on such things as the Greenland ice sheet and sea level rise. What happens in the Arctic affects all of us."

But not everyone is on board with the theory of a catastrophic release of methane from the oceans, with some calling it alarmist.

Some scientists say computer models suggest it could take thousands of years to sufficiently heat permafrost to allow methane to leak through and that the catastrophic scenario isn't feasible.

Others see these huge methane deposits as a potential solution to the world's energy crunch.

Andrew Applejohn, director of the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik, N.W.T., has been part of an effort by the Canadian and Japanese governments to look at whether methane trapped under permafrost on land in the Arctic can be turned into an energy source.

"The story is being come at from two different angles including the alarmist, cataclysmic climate change angle and the potential energy resource angle," he said.

"It highlights the fact that there's still a lot to be known, a lot to be researched, a lot to be determined as to both items."