Axial Seamount

A submarine volcano 1,100 m high on the Juan de Fuca Ridge off Oregon, where a hotspot and a spreading ridge meet. In 1998 it gave the first submarine eruption ever detected and followed as it happened; it erupted again in 2011 and 2015, and a cabled observatory now watches it live.

Dated events and their evidence

1983 CE mainstream
dives with the submersible Pisces IV at the north-west edge of the summit caldera find a hydrothermal vent community along a 300 m fissure; dives in 1983 and 1984 find the first active black smokers in the north Pacific source
1998 CE mainstream
January 1998: the US Navy's SOSUS hydrophones follow an eruption as it happens, the first submarine eruption detected and tracked in situ; its lava flows reach 13 m thick source
2011 CE mainstream
6 April 2011: Axial erupts again, three years before the 2014 that Chadwick and colleagues had calculated in 2006 from its re-inflation; the summit sinks by more than 2 m source
2015 CE mainstream
April 2015: the next eruption is recorded in real time by the seafloor seismometers of the Ocean Observatories Initiative's cabled array, which track the magma before and during it source
2016 CE mainstream
Nooner and Chadwick show that Axial erupts when its inflation reaches a threshold, so that its eruptions can be forecast from deformation data source
2025 CE mainstream
May 2025: more than 1,000 small earthquakes a day and an uplifted caldera floor show magma building up beneath the summit source

Where

46.0000° N, 130.0000° W

The point is Wikipedia's position for Axial Seamount, given only to the whole degree, so the summit caldera may lie some kilometres from it; the volcano stands on the Juan de Fuca Ridge about 480 km west of Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Sources

Open this place on the globe

Each event carries Aion's own evidence grade (mainstream, disputed or speculative). This page repeats what the globe shows for this place.