Underwater US volcano set to blow as experts predict date it will happen
An underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon could now erupt by mid-to-late 2026, researchers say. In December last year, experts said the Axial Seamount was nearing the threshold seen before an eruption and could erupt within 12 months — but now they predict that the eruption may come later than previously expected. (Picture: UW)
What is the Axial Seamount?
The underwater mount sits on the Juan de Fuca Ridge which is a divergent plate boundary off the US Pacific Northwest coast. It is known to be the most active submarine volcano in the Northeast Pacific Ocean, with known eruptions in 1998, 2011 and 2015. After the 2015 eruption, inflation below the seamount started to build again. The inflation rate gradually declined at the start of 2023 but by the fall of that year, rates of inflation and seismicity picked up again. (Picture: Interactive Oceans)
A team of researchers, including research associate Bill Chadwick, said that eruptions at Axial Seamount follow a period of high seismicity and steady ground inflation caused by magma rising below the seafloor. The last three eruptions happened at a similar, although slightly increasing, levels of inflation, so it’s thought the volcano would likely erupt again once it reached or exceeded this threshold. (Picture: Schmidt Ocean Institute)
Chadwick wrote in his paper: ‘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.’ However, by late 2024, Axial had reached 95% of the inflation level that preceded the eruption in 2015 until inflation rates had slowed again by late April 2025. (Picture: Google Maps)
Chadwick, who also co-runs a blog about the seamount, updated the blog in October to say: ‘It will take a bit more time than we anticipated to reach the same inflation threshold that the volcano reached before the last eruption. At the current rate of inflation, we won’t get to that higher inflation threshold until mid-to-late 2026.’ (Picture: NOAA)
It’s thought that the Axial Seamount behaves similarly to Iceland’s Krafla volcano. Chadwick says that currently, the ground is 4 inches (10 cm) higher than it was minutes before the 2015 eruption, with potentially another 8 inches (20 cm) to go before the next eruption. He said: ‘It’s really just an educated guess, but also based on the previous behaviour of volcanoes like Krafla.’ (Picture: Center for Environmental Visualization, University of Washington)
However, the Mail Online reports that the US Geological Survey (USGS) recorded a magnitude 4.2 earthquake less than 185 miles from Oregon’s coastal town of Barview at 3.38am ET on Wednesday morning. The quake’s epicenter was also roughly 200 miles from the Axial Seamount but Chadwick said this tremor won’t be the tipping point that sets off the volcano. (Picture: NSF/OOI)
He said: ‘There’s still a chance it could erupt by the end of the year. We don’t really know exactly when it will happen, but nothing seems imminent since the number of earthquakes per day is relatively low.’ Scientists may update their eruption prediction to late 2026 in the next few weeks because the ground swelling under the volcano has yet to reach the same levels it did before the last eruption a decade ago. (Picture: NOAA NeMo Observatory)
What will happen when it does blow?
Any eruption will not pose danger to humans as the depth of the volcano and how far it is from land means that it won’t be detectable on the surface. The volcano last erupted in April 2015, where around 10,000 small scale earthquakes were experienced in a 24-hour period. During the last eruption, magma flowed from Axial Seamount for a month and trailed about 25 miles across the seafloor. (Picture: Nature) Add Metro as a Preferred Source on Google Add as preferred source
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