Could a 1-km-deep under-water volcano trigger a disaster? showing signs of imminent eruption

A massive underwater volcano located approximately 300 miles off the Oregon coast, is showing signs it could erupt in 2025. It has sparked excitement as well as worry among scientists and deep-sea enthusiasts. The submarine volcano is known as Axial Seamount, sits at the edge of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, a tectonic plate boundary beneath the northeast Pacific Ocean. It is considered to be the most active underwater volcanoes in the world, with several major eruptions recorded in 1998, 2011, and 2015.

Impending eruption

The volcano is experiencing over 1000 small earthquakes, suggesting that the magma is on the move beneath the ocean floor. The caldera has been inflating at 25 centimetres per year, indicating magma accumulation. It is surprisingly close to what had happened before the previous eruptions.

Can it cause a disaster for humans?

Fortunately, Axial Seamount sits at 1 km beneath the sea surface, and scientists predict that its eruptions are non-explosive lavas, which are unlikely to threaten the coastal population or cause any major tsunamis. Seamounts like this are providing scientists with the perfect opportunity to study the evolution of early life on Earth.

"Vents have been around for a really, really long time. When we try to reconstruct what the earliest type of life may have looked like, a lot of people think that hydrothermal vents could have been an important site for those early microbes. They may have been heat-loving. They may have required things like iron, sulfur, and fool’s gold. These could have been really important for the early stages of the origin of life. And you find all those things in hydrothermal vents,” said Rika Anderson, associate professor at Carleton College's Department of Biology. “They have laid down miles and miles of fiber optic cable that are connected from Newport, Oregon, all the way out to Axial Seamount. On that fiber optic cable, there are a whole bunch of deep-sea instruments that people have put on the sea floor to continuously monitor all kinds of things.”

However, there is a threat of deep-sea mining as such equipment gets frazzled in the brewing eruption.

Underwater eruptions like this can reshape the ocean floor, marine life and give insights into how marine life interacts deep beneath the sea.