Produced by: Manoj Kumar
Earth bubbles and broils beneath Axial Seamount, a hidden underwater volcano 480 km off Oregon’s coast. The rising magma is forcing the ocean floor to bulge, signaling an impending eruption before the end of 2025.
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Hundreds of earthquakes per day now rattle the seamount, a sharp increase tracked by scientists since 1997. Volcanologist Bill Chadwick warns, “It can’t do this forever.” The mountain is approaching a critical breaking point.
Unlike explosive volcanoes, Axial Seamount’s shield structure means its eruption will crack open, allowing magma to ooze out instead of triggering tsunamis or catastrophic blasts. The event will reshape the ocean floor in real time.
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A recent Nature study revealed multiple magma reservoirs beneath the volcano, trapped in layers of basalt and gabbro. Jidong Yang, a geophysicist at China University of Petroleum, calls the magma system “a puzzle still missing key pieces.”
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Axial has erupted three times in 30 years—1998, 2011, and 2015—each time following a near-identical inflation cycle. The volcano has now reached the same size as just before its last eruption, making 2025 the likely breaking point.
Sitting at the meeting point of two tectonic plates, Axial is a factory for new ocean crust. The seafloor spreads out as molten rock emerges, reshaping the deep-sea landscape with each eruption.
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Though not a human threat, Axial is a testbed for predicting eruptions. Chadwick hopes these findings will help forecast more dangerous volcanoes worldwide, offering a rare opportunity for scientific precision.
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Despite detailed mapping, the connection between magma flow and fissures remains unclear. Yang and his team found that past eruptions all occurred along the eastern caldera, but the reason why remains a geological mystery.
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The signs are unmistakable—inflation, seismic spikes, and rising magma pressures all indicate an eruption is inevitable. Scientists are now watching the seamount with unprecedented precision, awaiting the moment it breaks.
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