Major earthquake hits just miles from underwater volcano set to erupt,
Two large earthquakes have struck off the coast of Oregon, just miles from the summit of a massive underwater volcano expected to erupt at any time.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) announced that a 4.8 and 5.4 magnitude quake were detected Wednesday morning within 100 miles of the Axial Seamount.
Axial Seamount is a mile-wide underwater volcano that sits 300 miles off Oregon’s coast and more than 4,900 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean.
The first seaquake struck 9.42am ET just 25 miles from the caldera of the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest.
The second and larger of the two quakes was detected 18 minutes later, roughly 70 miles closer to the Oregon coast.
No tsunami warnings have been issued for the seismic events and Americans along the West Coast likely won’t feel any shaking caused by the two seaquakes.
However, researchers studying the Axial Seamount have warned that significant seismic activity will precede the volcano’s imminent eruption.
It last erupted in 2015, but scientists have recently detected a surge in seismic instability at the site, with over 2,000 small earthquakes recorded in a single day this summer.
Oregon State University geophysicist William Chadwick warned that he expects the Seamount to erupt ‘by the end of the year.’
‘We had a spike of over 2,000 earthquakes in one day back in June, but since then the number of earthquakes per day has been averaging only around 100 per day,’ Chadwick and Scott Nooner from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington revealed in a recent blog post.
‘We don’t really know what it will take to trigger the next eruption and exactly when that will happen.’
Until now, the quakes around the seamount have been small, typically magnitude 1 or 2, and too far offshore for humans to feel, but they’ve remained frequent.
In November 2024, 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 swelling that occurred prior to the 2015 eruption allowed Chadwick and his colleagues to predict that event.
William Wilcock, a professor and marine geophysicist at the University of Washington warned: ‘I would say it was going to erupt sometime later (this year) or early 2026, but it could be tomorrow, because it’s completely unpredictable.’
During its last eruption, roughly 8,000 earthquakes were triggered, producing 400-foot-thick lava flows and causing the bottom of the ocean to sink nearly eight feet.
Luckily, the upcoming eruption won’t pose a threat to anyone living along the West Coast, 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.
Instead, scientists have been monitoring the Axial Seamount to help them learn how to predict eruptions from nearby volcanos that do pose a risk to people.
For example, Washington State’s Mount Rainier sits just 240 miles from the underwater volcano.
Mount Rainier has been one of the most active volcanos in the Pacific Northwest’s Cascade Range, and a devastating eruption remains a real possibility in the near future.
Experts have said that it is only a matter of time until Mount Rainier unleashes a deadly volcanic event upon the region.
Earlier this month, chaos erupted in Indonesia as Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, one of the country’s most active volcanoes, blasted lava and ash into the sky.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki is one of more than 450 volcanoes along the Pacific Ring of Fire, a 25,000-mile horseshoe-shaped zone of intense seismic and volcanic activity encircling the Pacific Ocean.
It stretches from Russia and Japan in the west to the western coast of the US, and down to Antarctic. The Axial Seamount is also a part of the Ring of Fire.
