Axial Seamount, a submarine volcano about 4,900 feet underwater in the northeastern Pacific, has shown signs of possible eruption in 2025. Monitoring recorded over 2,000 earthquakes near the volcano on one day in June, then activity fell to about 100. July tsunami waves from an 8.8-magnitude Kamchatka quake triggered automated eruption alerts even though no eruption began. Inflation reached the 2015 level in January. The volcano erupted in 1998, 2011, and 2015. Expected eruptions are small, posing no risk to people, property, or tsunami generation. Inflation-based eruption prediction remains uncertain and exact triggers remain unknown.
"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 local media.
"Some researchers have hypothesized that the amount of inflation can predict when the volcano will erupt," said William Wilcock, a professor in the University of Washington in April, "and if they're correct it's very exciting for us, because it has already inflated to the level that it reached before the last three eruptions."
"That means it could really erupt any day now, if the hypothesis is correct."
"We don't really know what it will take to trigger the next eruption and exactly when that will happen," Chadwick and fellow researcher Scott Nooner, geophysics professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, wrote in their blog.
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