West Coast shaken by earthquake near underwater volcano

A major earthquake rattled the Oregon Coast near a highly active Pacific Northwest volcano, which experts say could erupt at any moment. 

The US Geological Survey (USGS) recorded a magnitude 4.2 earthquake less than 185 miles from Oregon’s coastal town of Barview at 3.38am ET on Wednesday morning.

However, the quake’s epicenter was also roughly 200 miles from the Axial Seamount, a volcano that last erupted in 2015 and has been building towards another massive eruption this year.

Wednesday’s earthquake was the third major seismic event in the area in two weeks. However, researcher and geophysics expert Bill Chadwick from Oregon State University said this tremor won’t be the tipping point that sets off the volcano.

Unlike the hundreds of smaller tremors being recorded directly under the volcano, Chadwick told Daily Mail these major quakes were tied to the nearby Blanco Fracture Zone, where tectonic plates slide past each other and cause seismic events.

Chadwick and his team have been monitoring the Seamount all year as the rate of these tiny earthquakes around the mouth of the volcano has steadily increased, a sign that an eruption is close.

They’ve previously warned that an eruption along the US West Coast could come at any time, but new seismic data from the Axial Seamount has pushed Chadwick to update, and likely delay, the countdown to an eruption.

‘There’s still a chance it could erupt by the end of the year. We don’t really know exactly when it will happen, but nothing seems imminent since the number of earthquakes per day is relatively low,’ Chadwick said.

The researcher explained that scientists will likely update their eruption prediction to late 2026 in the next few weeks because the ground swelling under the volcano has yet to reach the same levels it did before the last eruption a decade ago.

Scientists had previously estimated that the Axial Seamount would erupt once it swelled by more than 12 inches beyond the point it inflated to in 2015.

Currently, data from the Pacific Ocean shows the volcano’s rate of inflation is only at around six inches per year, meaning it could be another 12 months before the Seamounts hits a similar point as previous eruptions.

Chadwick and Scott Nooner, from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, have noted that seismic activity and inflation are signs that magma is moving up through cracks in the volcano.

As magma rises from inside the Earth’s crust, it inflates the Seamount like a balloon, stressing the surrounding rock and triggering hundreds of tiny earthquakes.

Since 2024, researchers have held to the prediction that the seafloor around the Axial Seamount’s caldera would rise roughly one foot higher than it did during the 2015 eruption.

That’s also the same level of inflation scientists saw four years after the volcano’s eruption in 2011.

While the Seamount has experienced as many as 2,000 earthquakes in one day back in August, it hasn’t kept that pace heading into fall, and the newest readings show the volcano’s inflation is only about half of what researchers expected.

‘The inflation threshold is just an ‘educated guess’ of when it might erupt again, but there is nothing magic about it,’ Chadwick noted.

‘The pattern could change. At the current rate of inflation, we won’t get to that higher inflation threshold until mid-to-late 2026,’ Chadwick and Nooner added in an October 27 blog post.

According to the latest earthquake histograms from the University of Washington’s William Wilcock and Maochuan Zhang, earthquakes around the volcano have actually fallen to their lowest levels since July.

When Axial Seamount does erupt, the number of underwater quakes is expected to skyrocket, rising from around 100 per day right now to as many as 10,000 earthquakes within 24 hours.

The 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.

Luckily, the impending eruption won’t pose any threat to human life in Washington, Oregon, and California, despite being only 300 miles from the coast.

It’s too deep and too far from shore for people to even notice when it erupts, and it likely won’t have any impact on seismic activity on land.

Even if the eruption is delayed by a year, Chadwick said the added buildup likely won’t change the nature of the eventual awakening or create any added risk to the public.

‘It’s hard to say what the size of the next eruption will be, but probably not too different from the last few eruptions,’ he revealed.