The Axial Seamount, the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest, has been making headlines lately with signs that it could erupt sometime this year.
But experts say there’s no immediate cause for alarm.
Located about 300 miles west of Astoria, Oregon — and sitting a mile beneath the ocean surface — the Axial Seamount showed an increase in earthquake activity this past March, but that surge has since been “like a bit of a lull.”
“It feels to me like Axial is just ‘treading water’ lately,” said Bill Chadwick, a volcanologist with Oregon State University, in an April 30 email to OPB reporter Jes Burns. “Inflation (of the volcano’s surface) is marching along at a fairly steady clip…but the rate of EQs (earthquakes) is down a bit lately.”
FILE - In this video still collected by a remote-operated vehicle named Jason with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in June 2022, superheated water and nutrients from an Axial Seamount hydrothermal vent supports a wide variety of life.
Courtesy of ROV Jason/WHOI
Axial is more geologically active than any of the towering Cascade volcanoes — including Mount St. Helens, Mount Hood and Mount Rainier — and it has erupted three times in the past 25 years, most recently in 2015.
Related: The Pacific Northwest’s most active (undersea) volcano is getting a little frisky
Unlike the explosive eruptions often associated with volcanoes, Axial is a shield volcano similar to those found in Hawaii or Iceland. When it erupts, it doesn’t blow its top. Instead, lava seeps through cracks on its slopes, flowing slowly across the seafloor.
The eruption of the Axial Seamount won’t cause any problems for humans.
“For the size of eruptions we’ve seen in the last 20 years … if you were on top of it on a boat, you would never know it,” Chadwick said to OPB in 2019.
But the Axial’s steady volcanic activity makes it a prime subject for scientific study.
Chadwick and his team have been monitoring Axial for decades, routinely visiting the site to gather data from instruments installed on the ocean floor.
Last year, Chadwick shared with OPB what he called a “wildly optimistic” forecast: the next eruption could happen in 2025 or 2026. He emphasized, though, that making such predictions for highly dangerous volcanoes needs to be handled with caution.
“At a real dangerous volcano, you don’t want to be issuing any predictions that you’re not sure are going to be true, because people might have to evacuate. There could be economic costs and freaking people out,” he said.
Related: Deep-sea volcano off the Oregon Coast helps scientists forecast eruptions
In the meantime, Chadwick and his colleagues are still trying to figure out how to accurately forecast volcanic eruptions that could eventually be used to make life-saving predictions when it counts.
OPB’s Jes Burns contributed to this story.
