[Rockhounds] Scientists predict an undersea volcano eruption near Oregon in 2025

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

An undersea volcano is likely to erupt sometime in 2025.

This much advance notice is a big deal, because forecasting eruptions more
than hours ahead is “pretty unique,” says geophysicist William Chadwick.
But 470 kilometers off the Oregon coast and over a kilometer beneath the
waves, a volcano known as Axial Seamount ticks all the boxes that hint at
imminent activity
<https://agu.confex.com/agu/agu24/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1560361>, Chadwick
and his colleagues reported December 10 at a meeting of the American
Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.

For the past decade, a suite of devices have been monitoring Axial’s every
action — rumbling, shaking, swelling, tilting — and delivering real-time
data via a seafloor cable. It’s “the most well-instrumented submarine
volcano on the planet,” says Mark Zumberge, a geophysicist at Scripps
Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in
the work.

But in November, a particular milestone caught Chadwick’s eye: Axial’s
surface had ballooned to nearly the same height as it had before its last
eruption in 2015 — fortuitously, just months after monitoring began.
Ballooning is a sign that magma has accumulated underground and is building
pressure.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/scientists-undersea-volcano-eruption