• China has pulled a record amount of clathrate hydrate natural gas from the South China Sea.
• Methane hydrate is the result of specific environmental conditions that make it very hard to mine.
• This is just one kind of clathrate, but the family can include many elements and shapes.

China’s natural gas industry has announced a record amount of “fire ice” extracted from the South China Sea. If that sounds like something out of a twisty George R. R. Martin novel, the truth is arguably more intricate.

This coy term refers to methane hydrates, the natural-gas-and-water version of an overall category called clathrates. In a clathrate, one kind of molecule forms a scaffold or lattice that traps another kind of molecule.

In a methane hydrate, ice crystals trap…