Underwater Volcano Offers Geologists Rare Look at Eruption in Real Time Nadia Drake - National Geographic
go to original December 30, 2016

Lava formed glassy pillow-like structures on the seafloor during a 2015 eruption on Axial Seamount off the Oregon coast. (National Geographic)

When an undersea volcano erupted off the coast of Oregon in May 2015, Scott Nooner wasn’t surprised - he was excited.

Nooner and his colleague William Chadwick had predicted that the half-mile-high Axial Seamount would erupt within 15 months, a forecast based on years of watching the volcano inflate and deflate.

Because Axial Seamount’s lava chamber is concealed by only a relatively thin layer of Earth’s crust, it acts as a window into volcanic processes that are often quite difficult to observe on land, and it could bolster the ability to predict eruptions more than days or weeks ahead of time.

Volcanoes are as dangerous as they are majestic. Over 50 eruptions rock our planet every year. This video helps you understand what causes volcanoes to form and erupt - and shows where they are most likely to be found. (National Geographic)

“By studying a volcano with a very shallow and well-imaged magma chamber and a simple crustal structure, we can learn things about how volcanoes work that is difficult in settings where the magma chamber is deep and the crust much more complicated,” says the University of Washington’s William Wilcock.

“Axial Seamount is actually a relatively simple volcano, and it has what appears to be relatively repeatable behavior,” adds Nooner, a geophysicist at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, speaking today at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco.

“We can understand these simple systems first, and then move to more complex volcanoes and apply similar ideas.”

Read the rest at National Geographic

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