Underwater volcano ready to erupt off the West Coast, scientists warn
'At the moment, there are a couple hundred earthquakes a day, but that's still a lot less than we saw before the previous eruption,' Wilcock explained. 'I would say it was going to erupt sometime later (this year) or early 2026, but it could be tomorrow, because it's completely unpredictable,' the marine geophysicist added. The region has seen a sharp rise in the number of earthquakes in just the last month, with a major spike in activity recorded on April 13. Since May 6, the number of daily earthquakes under the seamount has been steadily rising.
If Axial Seamount does blow within the next few days, it won't pose any threat human communities along the West Coast, experts say. It's too deep and too far from shore for people to even notice when it erupts, and it has no impact on seismic activity on land. However, the number of underwater quakes is expected to skyrocket during this event, rising from several hundred per day right now to 10,000 earthquakes within a 24-hour period as magma flows out of the seafloor volcano, according to Interesting Engineering.
Mike Poland, a scientist at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, expressed excitement about the eruption, highlighting Axial Seamount as one of the world's best-monitored submarine volcanoes. 'This particular volcano is probably the best-monitored submarine volcano in the world,' he told Cowboy State Daily. 'It's fascinating and doesn't really pose a hazard.' Situated along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a chain of undersea volcanoes extending between Oregon and Alaska, Axial Seamount is a young shield volcano - a broader volcano with a low profile.
'When Axial Seamount erupts, it'll look a lot like a Hawaiian lava flow eruption,' Poland said. 'It's not an explosive eruption, but calm effusions of lava flowing out of the caldera and across the seafloor.' Scientists warned last year that Axial Seamount was going to erupt by the end of 2025. 'Because it's had these three eruptions in the last 30 years, that's why we call it the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest, because most of the ones on land aren't active that frequently, and they spend a lot of their time slumbering, whereas Axial has a pretty active magma supply,' Chadwick told local CBS affiliate KOIN 6 News.
'So, if it's not erupting, it's inflating and getting ready for the next one. And so that's why we're kind of monitoring what's happening to it all the time.' Eruptions from Axial Seamount were recorded in 1998, 2011, and 2015, and the volcano has undoubtedly erupted numerous times prior to those events, according to Poland. In November 2024, Oregon State University geophysicist William Chadwick started investigating the volcano when he noticed its surface had swelled to nearly the same height it reached before its last eruption 10 years ago.
The swelling that occurred prior to the 2015 eruption allowed Chadwick and his colleagues to predict that event. This time, their observations told them that Axial Seamount would erupt before the end of 2025. 'Based on the current trends, and the assumption that Axial will be primed to erupt when it reaches the 2015 inflation threshold, our current eruption forecast window is between now (July 2024) and the end of 2025,' the researchers reported.
They also found that seismic activity at Axial Seamount had increased, with hundreds of earthquakes generated around the volcano per day and earthquake swarms greater than 500 per day. Frequent, small earthquakes like these can signal that magma locked beneath the ocean floor is creeping closer to the surface. The team shared their findings at the annual American Geophysical Union conference in December 2024. Wilcock noted that the first sign that an eruption from this volcano is imminent would be a sharp increase in the number of earthquakes around it - which the area is now experiencing.
'That period lasts about an hour, and then the magma reaches the surface,' Wilcock said in a statement last month. After that, 'the seismic activity dies down pretty quickly over the next few days, but the eruption will continue slowly for about a month,' he added. This impending eruption will be a major research opportunity for Wilcock and other scientists, who plan to use a suite of high-tech instruments to monitor the eruption from start to finish. The University of Washington's College of the Environment hosts one of the largest underwater observatories in the world, comprised of networks of sensors along the seafloor and throughout the ocean waters.
When Axial Seamount finally erupts, Wilcock and his colleagues will use this array to gather data and images of the event as it unfolds. Even though Axial is not a dangerous undersea volcano, the forecasting capabilities scientists have gained from studying it could help them predict eruptions from those that are. For example, in January 2022, an extremely powerful eruption of the Hunga underwater volcano in the Tonga archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean triggered a tsunami that caused an estimated $90 billion in damages . This massive wave impacted California, Hawaii, and parts of Canada, Chile, Fiji, Japan, New Zealand, Mexico and Peru. The West Coast won't have to worry about Axial causing an event like that. But its eruption will provide an opportunity for scientists to learn more about how these powerful geological structures work - and now it could come at any time.
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