Deep-sea volcano off Oregon is rumbling again, likely to erupt anytime soon
Axial Seamount, a submarine volcano located nearly a mile beneath the ocean surface, is flexing its geologic muscles.
Perched on a hot spot along the Juan de Fuca Ridge, where the Pacific and Juan de Fuca tectonic plates are slowly pulling apart, the volcano is steadily inflating with magma, increasing the frequency of small earthquakes.
Researchers with the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative, which operates the Regional Cabled Array at the University of Washington, say the uptick in seismic activity suggests an eruption may be near.
'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,' said William Wilcock, a marine geophysicist at the University of Washington.
While predicting the exact timing is tricky, Wilcock said an eruption could occur anytime between later this year and early 2026 — or even tomorrow.
'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 researchers also said that the region could witness thousands of small-scale earthquakes as the volcano erupts underwater.
In 2015, 10,000 earthquakes were recorded within 24 hours as magma flowed out of the seafloor volcano for a month, trailing about 25 miles (40 kilometers) underwater. Axial Seamount's magma chamber has collapsed several times over the years, leaving behind a deep, wide basin known as a caldera.
Despite the extreme conditions, life flourishes here. Hydrothermal vents scattered across the caldera floor release mineral-rich fluids into the icy seawater, creating plumes teeming with microbes — a phenomenon scientists call 'snowblowers.'
While past eruptions have wiped out the tiny creatures clustered around these vents, their return is surprisingly swift. Within just a few months, the ecosystem begins to regenerate.
'I think it's one of the biggest discoveries we've made,' said Kelley, a professor of marine geology and geophysics at the University of Washington, in a statement.
'Life thrives in these inhospitable environments, and volcanoes are probably one of the major sources of life in our oceans.'
Marine life, she said, may feel the seismic shifting after the eruption, but the activity could go unnoticed by people on land.
'It's not a very explosive event. You won't see the ash clouds above water, anything like that,' Kelly said.
'It's like if you put a mile of seawater on top of Kilauea … you may see some fountaining, but that's it.'
Researchers said that the eruptions are most likely to occur between January and April, as previous events in 1998, 2011, and 2015 took place during this period. Scientists suspect that seasonal gravitational shifts play a role as Earth moves farther from the sun during the early months of the year.
The moon's pull on ocean tides causes regular changes in pressure along the seafloor, and when magma is already close to the surface, even minor stress variations can make a difference.
High tides, in particular, seem to coincide with more frequent seismic activity near the caldera, possibly pushing the magma chamber past its breaking point.
The observatory plans to publicly livestream the event the next time the volcano erupts.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Humans used to have straighter teeth—what changed?
Braces, rubber bands, even jaw surgery—millions endure them in pursuit of a straighter smile. But were misaligned smiles always this common? Research suggests that might not be the case. While malocclusions—crowded or misaligned teeth—have been found among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they appear to be more prevalent in modern populations. So what changed? Experts say the answer isn't simple but point to one possible culprit: our diets. As we traded raw, tough foods for softer, more processed ones, the burden of chewing decreased, allowing our jaws to shrink over time. Now, researchers are exploring how evolutionary biology, diet, and modern lifestyles may have reshaped our faces—and our smiles. Ancient human skulls were strikingly different from our own. Early hunter-gatherers had large, powerful jaws built for the demanding work of chewing tough meats, fibrous vegetables, seeds, and nuts. But around 12,000 years ago, things began to change. As humans around the world traded hunting for farming, their diets changed too, incorporating more grains and cultivated produce into their diet. These foods were softer, more processed, and required far less chewing.' We did not have ice cream or white bread back in the day,' says Sue Herring, professor emeritus in orthodontics at the University of Washington. 'When you get your food straight from the environment, it's probably a little [grittier] than stuff which has been cooked and processed.' (Neanderthal teeth reveal intimate details of daily life.) With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record. That shrinkage is, at least in part, adaptive and the result of millennia of evolution, says Myra Laird, assistant professor of basic and translational sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. 'If you don't need a huge mandible, it's energetically costly to build that extra bone.' But not all changes in jaw size and shape are evolutionary. Bone is highly responsive to physical stress—even within a single lifetime—and builds up around muscle attachment sites. In other words, less muscle usage results in less robust bones, Laird says, citing studies of craniofacial growth in non-human animals like hyraxes. 'If you switch to a liquid diet, you will not use your muscles as much and see some shape changes in your face.' (Here's how ultra-processed food harms the body and brain.) That's exactly what researchers believe happened to humans as they adopted agriculture. 'Post-agricultural populations had a marked reduction in the size of the chewing muscles,' Laird says. 'What this suggests is that the origins of agriculture brought about less work for the feeding system'—and, ultimately, much less roomy mouths. So, what happens when you try to fit the same number of teeth into a smaller jaw space? Over-crowding and crookedness. 'The way your teeth come through is almost like a zipper,' says Julie Lawrence, assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 'Your jaw moves forward and then it makes space for them to come through.' If there isn't enough room for the teeth to erupt, they might become impacted or crowded together. The third molars, or wisdom teeth, are particularly at risk for noneruption in undersized jaws. Research suggests that the mismatch between the size of the mandible and dentition may be to blame for increasingly crooked teeth among post-industrial humans. 'That loss of space is really what precipitates the malocclusions, dental crowding,' says Laird. 'The rate of malocclusion goes way, way up [in modern humans], and that is ubiquitous across all populations.' (Why we add fluoride to water—and how it became so controversial.) But experts caution that the story isn't so simple. Although the frequency of malocclusions seems to have increased among modern humans, dental impaction and crowding have been observed in early hominid skulls. The fossil record is limited and likely not fully representative, Lawrence says. 'Better teeth tend to be better preserved,' she says, adding that anthropological data doesn't take into account confounding factors like missing teeth. While 'there does seem to be a pattern' of increased malocclusions among post-industrialization humans, Lawrence adds, not all changes in teeth alignment can be attributed to diet. Extreme under- or overbite, for example, is the result of population genetics and 'doesn't have to do with industrialization.' Many other factors can cause crooked teeth, including environmental conditions or developmental anomalies. And some populations are more genetically predisposed to malocclusions. Ultimately, the prevalence of crooked teeth may also be due in small part to aesthetic bias. 'Our modern society is a lot more sensitive to cosmetic problems,' Herring says. 'I think we're a lot more aware of malocclusions now than anybody was in the past.'
USA Today
a day ago
- USA Today
A look at the collision that created the biggest black hole merger yet
It's nearly 10 billion light-years away, and you won't see it in the night sky, but the explosive collision of two massive black holes detected in 2023 has created a third one, with 225 times the mass of our sun, the largest black hole merger ever charted. The stellar event has astrophysicists rewriting record books and rethinking theories on how objects form in space. The collision is noteworthy because the two black holes were larger than those in previous collisions. One was about 140 times the mass of our sun, the other about 100 times the mass. (Some mass was converted to energy in the collision.) How was the collision of two black holes detected? The two black holes were spinning at about 400,000 times faster than the Earth's rotation when they collided, billions of years ago. The collision created gravitational waves – ripples in the fabric of spacetime. They were detected on Nov. 23, 2023, by Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory devices on Earth. LIGO designated the gravitational wave signal as GW231123. And while this is the largest black hole merger we've seen, larger black holes exist. The M87 black hole has an estimated mass of 6.5 billion suns. The TON 618 black hole has 40 billion solar masses. What are black holes and why are they important? Black holes 'aren't really holes,' NASA says. 'They're huge concentrations of matter packed into very tiny spaces.' 'A black hole is so dense that gravity just beneath its surface, the event horizon, is strong enough that nothing – not even light – can escape. The event horizon isn't a surface like Earth's or even the Sun's. It's a boundary that contains all the matter that makes up the black hole.' It's likely there are "millions of black holes in the Milky Way alone," according to the National Science Foundation. They orbit "like the stars, but we cannot see them." For the most part, "black holes are created when massive stars collapse at the end of their lives," says the University of Chicago. Studying them has "yielded enormous insights about the nature of the universe." The LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration has identified 69 gravitational-wave signals from binary black hole mergers from 2015 to 2020. The collaboration announced the GW231123 discovery at the GR-Amaldi gravitational-waves conference in Glasgow, United Kingdom, on July 14. The LIGO program is funded by the National Science Foundation, which faces a proposed $5.2 billion budget cut from the Trump administration. One of the two LIGO observatories could be closed if the cuts are made. SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; Reuters; NASA; California Institute of Technology; LIGO CalTech; Nature;
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Humans used to have straighter teeth—what changed?
Braces, rubber bands, even jaw surgery—millions endure them in pursuit of a straighter smile. But were misaligned smiles always this common? Research suggests that might not be the case. While malocclusions—crowded or misaligned teeth—have been found among our hunter-gatherer ancestors, they appear to be more prevalent in modern populations. So what changed? Experts say the answer isn't simple but point to one possible culprit: our diets. As we traded raw, tough foods for softer, more processed ones, the burden of chewing decreased, allowing our jaws to shrink over time. Now, researchers are exploring how evolutionary biology, diet, and modern lifestyles may have reshaped our faces—and our smiles. Ancient human skulls were strikingly different from our own. Early hunter-gatherers had large, powerful jaws built for the demanding work of chewing tough meats, fibrous vegetables, seeds, and nuts. But around 12,000 years ago, things began to change. As humans around the world traded hunting for farming, their diets changed too, incorporating more grains and cultivated produce into their diet. These foods were softer, more processed, and required far less chewing.' We did not have ice cream or white bread back in the day,' says Sue Herring, professor emeritus in orthodontics at the University of Washington. 'When you get your food straight from the environment, it's probably a little [grittier] than stuff which has been cooked and processed.' (Neanderthal teeth reveal intimate details of daily life.) With softer diets came less mechanical strain on the jaw. Over generations, our mandibles began to shrink— a trend visible in the fossil record. That shrinkage is, at least in part, adaptive and the result of millennia of evolution, says Myra Laird, assistant professor of basic and translational sciences at the University of Pennsylvania School of Dental Medicine. 'If you don't need a huge mandible, it's energetically costly to build that extra bone.' But not all changes in jaw size and shape are evolutionary. Bone is highly responsive to physical stress—even within a single lifetime—and builds up around muscle attachment sites. In other words, less muscle usage results in less robust bones, Laird says, citing studies of craniofacial growth in non-human animals like hyraxes. 'If you switch to a liquid diet, you will not use your muscles as much and see some shape changes in your face.' (Here's how ultra-processed food harms the body and brain.) That's exactly what researchers believe happened to humans as they adopted agriculture. 'Post-agricultural populations had a marked reduction in the size of the chewing muscles,' Laird says. 'What this suggests is that the origins of agriculture brought about less work for the feeding system'—and, ultimately, much less roomy mouths. So, what happens when you try to fit the same number of teeth into a smaller jaw space? Over-crowding and crookedness. 'The way your teeth come through is almost like a zipper,' says Julie Lawrence, assistant professor of biological anthropology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 'Your jaw moves forward and then it makes space for them to come through.' If there isn't enough room for the teeth to erupt, they might become impacted or crowded together. The third molars, or wisdom teeth, are particularly at risk for noneruption in undersized jaws. Research suggests that the mismatch between the size of the mandible and dentition may be to blame for increasingly crooked teeth among post-industrial humans. 'That loss of space is really what precipitates the malocclusions, dental crowding,' says Laird. 'The rate of malocclusion goes way, way up [in modern humans], and that is ubiquitous across all populations.' (Why we add fluoride to water—and how it became so controversial.) But experts caution that the story isn't so simple. Although the frequency of malocclusions seems to have increased among modern humans, dental impaction and crowding have been observed in early hominid skulls. The fossil record is limited and likely not fully representative, Lawrence says. 'Better teeth tend to be better preserved,' she says, adding that anthropological data doesn't take into account confounding factors like missing teeth. While 'there does seem to be a pattern' of increased malocclusions among post-industrialization humans, Lawrence adds, not all changes in teeth alignment can be attributed to diet. Extreme under- or overbite, for example, is the result of population genetics and 'doesn't have to do with industrialization.' Many other factors can cause crooked teeth, including environmental conditions or developmental anomalies. And some populations are more genetically predisposed to malocclusions. Ultimately, the prevalence of crooked teeth may also be due in small part to aesthetic bias. 'Our modern society is a lot more sensitive to cosmetic problems,' Herring says. 'I think we're a lot more aware of malocclusions now than anybody was in the past.'
