Underwater Volcano Offers Rare Look at Eruption in Real Time
Axial Seamount off the Oregon coast gave geologists the show of a lifetime thanks to careful predictions and a network of sunken sensors.
San Francisco, CaliforniaWhen an undersea volcano erupted off the coast of Oregon in May 2015, Scott Nooner wasn’t surprised—he was excited.
Nooner and his colleague William Chadwick had predicted that the half-mile-high Axial Seamount would erupt within 15 months, a forecast based on years of watching the volcano inflate and deflate.
Because Axial Seamount’s lava chamber is concealed by only a relatively thin layer of Earth’s crust, it acts as a window into volcanic processes that are often quite difficult to observe on land, and it could bolster the ability to predict eruptions more than days or weeks ahead of time.
“By studying a volcano with a very shallow and well-imaged magma chamber and a simple crustal structure, we can learn things
