An underwater volcano off the West Coast is predicted to erupt at any moment, and the world can watch it happen live.
Axial Seamount, located roughly 300 miles off Oregon‘s coast on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, is the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest.
Scientists monitoring the underwater beast recently set up a camera near its peak, allowing the public to tune in the moment it explodes.
The livestream runs daily at 2:00, 5:00, 8:00, and 11:00 ET and PT in 14-minute segments on the Interactive Oceans website.
‘The HD video focuses on the 14-foot tall actively venting hot spring deposit called ‘Mushroom’ located within the ASHES vent field on Axial Seamount, located on the western side of the volcano,’ the Ocean Observations Initiative said in a statement.
The vent sits atop an ancient lava flow, where radiating cracks are lined with white bacterial mats and small tube worms, which are clear signs of warm fluids slowly seeping through fractures in the basalt.
Its last eruption, in 2015, was a massive event that triggered roughly 8,000 earthquakes, unleashed lava flows hundreds of feet thick, and caused the seafloor to suddenly collapse by nearly eight feet.
Volcanologist Bill Chadwick told KGW: ‘It’s at or almost at that inflation threshold where it erupted last time. So, we think it’s ready.‘
The camera focuses on an undersea hydrothermal vent field, featuring the 14-foot-tall ‘Mushroom’ formation, a hotspot where minerals are altered by intense volcanic heat
In November 2024, Oregon State University geophysicist William Chadwick started investigating the volcano when he noticed its surface had swelled to nearly the same height it reached before its last eruption 10 years ago
The volcano sits more than 4,900 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface and is showing intense signs of an impending eruption as pressure steadily increases beneath the seafloor.
This dramatic shift occurred when the volcano’s underground magma chamber emptied abruptly, reshaping the seafloor across a 25-mile radius.
According to Chadwick, a volcanologist and research professor at Oregon State University, the Axial Seamount acts a lot like the volcanoes in Hawaii and is set to spew out over a billion cubic feet of ‘very fluid lava’ weighing millions of tons at any moment.
‘They tend to inflate like a balloon in between eruptions. At Axial, the seafloor is actually rising, and that’s a big signal,’ Chadwick said.
Based on the 2015 eruption, he added that this year’s magma explosion could produce a lava flow that’s nearly as tall as Seattle’s Space Needle.
In recent weeks, there has been a massive uptick in the number of earthquakes under the seamount, caused by this magma pushing to the surface.
The number of underwater quakes is expected to skyrocket during this event, rising from several hundred per day right now to 10,000 earthquakes within a 24-hour period as magma flows out of the seafloor volcano.
According to a recent study, the efforts to predict Axial Seamount’s next eruption since 2015 have failed because the seafloor’s swelling slowed steadily between 2015 and 2023.
A vent on the undersea volcano Axial Seamount
If Axial Seamount does blow, it won’t pose any threat human communities, experts say. It’s too deep and too far from shore for people to even notice when it erupts, and it has no impact on seismic activity on land
However, the rate of swelling has recently sped up again, and the total rise is close to what it was before the 2015 eruption.
Chadwick began investigating Axial in November 2024 after noticing the seafloor swelling to nearly the same height as before the most recent eruption.
‘The volcano has suddenly woken up,’ he stated in a 2024 study.
This awakening is marked by rapid changes in the volcano’s shape and behavior, particularly through a process called inflation, where magma pushes upward, causing the seafloor above to swell.
Think of it like blowing up a balloon until it pops.
The 2015 eruption marked a turning point for underwater volcano monitoring, thanks to the Ocean Observations Initiative, which installed a network of GPS, pressure sensors, and a high-definition camera system near the seamount.
This massive underwater volcano sits 300 miles off the coast of Oregon and more than 4,900 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean
The volcano is located off the coast of Oregon. Pictured is a quaint town in the state
Axial has a well-documented history of eruptions recorded in 1998, 2011, and 2015.
While the earlier two eruptions were detected only after the fact, the 2015 event was the first caught almost in real-time, paving the way for more precise forecasts.
Despite its power, experts say Axial Seamount poses no threat to human communities.
It’s too deep and too far offshore for people to notice when it erupts and has no impact on seismic activity on land.
‘It is probably the best-monitored submarine volcano in the world,’ Chadwick said.
Monitoring Axial offers scientists a rare chance to better understand underwater volcanic eruptions, events that are harder to see and predict than those on land.
