10 May 2025| 11 Dhul Qa’ada 1446
Things are heating up hundreds of miles off the coast of Oregon, where a large undersea volcano is showing signs of impending eruption, scientists say.
The volcano, known as Axial Seamount, is located nearly 1 mile (1.4 kilometers) underwater on a geological hot spot, where searing gushes of molten rock rise from Earth’s mantle and into the crust. Hotspot volcanoes are common on the seafloor. But Axial Seamount also happens to be located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge — an area where two massive tectonic plates (the Pacific and the Juan de Fuca plates) are constantly spreading apart, causing a steady buildup of pressure beneath the planet’s surface.
The frequency of earthquakes has recently picked up dramatically as the volcano inflates with increasingly more magma, signaling an eruption could be near, according to researchers at the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array, a facility operated by the University of Washington that monitors the activity of Axial Seamount.
“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 and professor at the University of Washington School of Oceanography who studies the volcano.
“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,” he said.
What happens during an eruption?
During the volcano’s last eruption in April 2015, the team observed about 10,000 small-scale earthquakes in a 24-hour period, and the same can be expected for the next one, Wilcock said.
Magma — molten rock beneath Earth’s surface — oozed out of Axial Seamount for a month and trailed about 25 miles (40 kilometers) across the seafloor, he added.
The magma chamber at the heart of the volcano has also collapsed several times in the past, creating a large crater called a caldera. There, sea life thrives off the mineral-rich gases that exit through hydrothermal vents, which are like underwater hot springs. Streams of hot fluid containing billions of microbes and clumps of waste billow up from cracks in the caldera’s surface, creating white plumes called “snowblowers.”
During previous eruptions, the small plants and animals living on the hydrothermal vents were scorched by lava flows, but just three months later, their ecosystem was back and flourishing again, said Debbie Kelley, director of the Regional Cabled Array.
“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.”
