A volcano eruption near Oregon is brewing — but don’t panic about Axial Seamount.
The undersea volcano has been attracting attention for months as scientists prepare for an eruption they expect sometime in 2025. But because the top of the volcano is 4,500 feet below the ocean’s surface, it poses no danger to people.
The volcanologists watching it remotely wrote at the end of April that it’s in “a bit of a lull” right now.
The massive undersea volcano reaches more than 3,600 feet above the seabed is located 300 miles offshore. It last erupted in 2015.
USA TODAY reported on the volcano in February, and little has changed since then.
“A year ago, Axial seemed to be taking a nap but now it’s waking up and we think it’s likely to erupt before the end of 2025,” said Bill Chadwick, a volcanologist with Oregon State University who’s part of a team that’s studying the volcano, told USA TODAY at the time.
In an April 30 post, Chadwick said the magma inflation continued on “at a fairly steady clip” but the rate of earthquakes had fallen.
Overall, the undersea volcano continues to grow but it “sure doesn’t seem like anything is imminent,” he wrote.
“I think I’m getting a little impatient. I probably need to take some deep breaths and calm down! Still got 8 months to go before my latest forecast runs out of time,” he noted.
Chadwick was calm enough to leave for a three-week expedition to Guam on May 7 to explore the Mariana Trench – though he noted that those following Oregon’s undersea volcano joke that it’s most likely to erupt when its least convenient. “May is looking like a pretty inconvenient time for Axial to erupt … so you never know!”
Scott Nooner, a professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who co-runs the Axial Seamount blog with Chadwick, said on May 16 that there’s no new news.
“We are still waiting for activity to pick up there,” he said.
Dating of the flows around the seamount shows that it has erupted about 50 times over the last 800 years, about once every 15 years on average.
A series of instruments around the volcano indicate a reservoir has been refilling with magma since its last eruption, gradually inflating so that it’s bulging upward.
A 3D bathymetric map showing the shape and summit caldera of the Axial seamount, 300 miles off Oregon’s coast. Warm colors indicate shallower depths, cool colors are deeper.
“The pressure inside the volcano is building,” Chadwick previously said. “Eventually, it becomes too great and a crack opens up and lava spews out of the fissure.”
What will happen when the volcano erupts?
Among humans, only scientists using an array of instruments will know about the eruption.
“If you were in a boat right over the seamount you probably would never know it’s erupting, as there’s no effect on the ocean surface,” Chadwick previously said. “Though if you lowered a hydrophone you might hear it because there’d be a lot of commotion going on.”
Underwater, the lava cools more quickly than it would in the air, so it will make what’s known as pillow lava. These are bulbous pillows of lava that form enormous mounds that can overwhelm everything around them.
“In the 2015 eruption, they were 450 feet deep. For perspective, that’s two-thirds the height of the Space Needle in Seattle,” Chadwick said.
The eruptions can last between days and months.
The eruption couldn’t trigger a tsunami or earthquakes on land, but it would expel enormous amounts of lava into the ocean. In 2015, Axial spewed out 5.5 billion cubic feet of lava.
An amazing research opportunity
Researchers hope they can get an unmanned submersible down to see what’s happening while the lava is still flowing.
“Nobody’s ever witnessed an eruption like that,” he said.
Studying Axial is important because it’s a natural laboratory for volcanologists, allowing them to test theories and safely make predictions.
Axial is the world’s most extensively studied undersea volcano because more than 660 miles of undersea cables crisscross it, sending a steady stream of real-time data about the area to scientists. The Regional Cabled Array includes more than 140 instruments that are constantly monitoring it.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Axial Seamount undersea volcano eruption could happen soon
