An underwater volcano off the West Coast is predicted to erupt at any moment, and the world can watch it happen live.
Axial Seamount, located roughly 300 miles off Oregon's coast on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, is the most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest.
Scientists monitoring the underwater beast recently set up a camera near its peak, allowing the public to tune in the moment it explodes.
The livestream runs daily at 2:00, 5:00, 8:00, and 11:00 ET and PT in 14-minute segments on the Interactive Oceans website.
'The HD video focuses on the 14-foot tall actively venting hot spring deposit called ‘Mushroom’ located within the ASHES vent field on Axial Seamount, located on the western side of the volcano,' the Ocean Observations Initiative said in a statement.
The vent sits atop an ancient lava flow, where radiating cracks are lined with white bacterial mats and small tube worms, which are clear signs of warm fluids slowly seeping through fractures in the basalt.
Its last eruption, in 2015, was a massive event that triggered roughly 8,000 earthquakes, unleashed lava flows hundreds of feet thick, and caused the seafloor to suddenly collapse by nearly eight feet.
Volcanologist Bill Chadwick told KGW: 'It’s at or almost at that inflation threshold where it erupted last time. So, we think it’s ready.'
The volcano sits more than 4,900 feet below the Pacific Ocean's surface and is showing intense signs of an impending eruption as pressure steadily increases beneath the seafloor.
This dramatic shift occurred when the volcano's underground magma chamber emptied abruptly, reshaping the seafloor across a 25-mile radius.
According to Chadwick, a volcanologist and research professor at Oregon State University, the Axial 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 at any moment.
'They tend to inflate like a balloon in between eruptions. At Axial, the seafloor is actually rising, and that's a big signal,' Chadwick said.
Based on the 2015 eruption, he added that this year's magma explosion could produce a lava flow that's nearly as tall as Seattle's Space Needle.
In recent weeks, there has been a massive uptick in the number of earthquakes under the seamount, caused by this magma pushing to the surface.
The number of underwater quakes is expected to skyrocket during this event, rising from several hundred per day right now to 10,000 earthquakes within a 24-hour period as magma flows out of the seafloor volcano.
No comments:
Post a Comment