Mile-deep underwater volcano could erupt off West Coast this year, scientists say
Scientists are predicting that a mile-deep volcano off the U.S. West Coast will erupt this year.
The Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano located about 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, is displaying behavior that indicates an eruption is imminent in 2025, William Chadwick, research associate at the Oregon State University, told ABC News.
The seamount is the most active submarine volcano in the northeast Pacific, and researchers have been monitoring it for the last 30 years, during which it has erupted three times, Chadwick said.
"It seems to have this pretty repeatable pattern from one eruption to the next," Chadwick said.
The volcano has been inflating "like a balloon" as molten rock accumulates within, the researchers have observed. Since each of the eruptions have occurred as the volcano reaches a certain level of inflation, volcanologists believe it will erupt within the year.
The seamount is beginning to reach the inflation stages that preceded the last eruption in 2015, Chadwick said.
Scientists are able to monitor the volcano through monitoring instruments and cables that extend from the coast, including seismometers that provide information on the earthquakes occurring near the volcano, Chadwick said.
"And so we actually have real time data from Axial Seamount, which is pretty unusual," he said.
The Axial Seamount tends to expel "controlled" eruptions about a mile beneath the sea surface -- deep enough and far enough away from the coast that it won't threaten human lives, Scott Nooner, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, told ABC News.
"If you were on a boat above the volcano, you wouldn't know at all that it had erupted," Nooner said.
While the eruption poses no danger to humans, an accurate prediction could put researchers closer to accurately being able to forecast volcanic eruptions, according to researchers.
Volcano eruptions are generally hard to predict outside of a short-term time frame, Nooner said.
But using the Axial Seamount and the underwater "natural" laboratory to learn how to forecast volcanic eruptions is much safer than doing so on land, where false alarms could send people into a panic, Chadwick said.
"You don't want to issue false alarms and cause evacuations and and so forth," he said. "...We can kind of experiment with issuing a forecast and seeing if it works out or not."
Continuing to monitor the Axial Seamount will give researchers invaluable data to be able to more accurately predict volcanic eruptions -- and further out, the researchers said.
"Volcanologists would like to be able to issue forecasts further out to give more warning, and that's generally harder to do," Chadwick said.
