A giant volcano is slowly inflating under the Pacific, and the main reaction from scientists isn’t terror; it’s mild irritation that Axial Seamount has moved the finish line yet again.
Roughly 300 miles off the Oregon coast and nearly a mile underwater, Axial sits on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, where seafloor plates pull apart and magma leaks through the gap. It’s the most active known submarine volcano in the Northeast Pacific, with eruptions in 1998, 2011, and 2015.
After scientists successfully called the 2015 eruption, Axial became a long-running science bet. “After successfully forecasting the 2015 eruption at Axial, we’ve been attempting to forecast the next since then,” Oregon State University volcanologist Bill Chadwick told Live Science.
For a while, the next big date seemed close. Magma refilled the reservoir, the seafloor puffed up, and by late 2024 Axial had hit about 95 percent of the inflation seen before 2015. An AGU presentation that year suggested a likely eruption window between mid-2024 and the end of 2025.
Then the volcano stalled. Inflation slowed in early 2025, and by October, Chadwick updated the Axial Blog to say “it will take a bit more time than we anticipated” and that, at current rates, “we won’t get to that higher inflation threshold until mid-to-late 2026.”
Right now, the summit sits about four inches higher than minutes before 2015, and researchers think it needs roughly eight more to break. “It’s really just an educated guess,” Bill Chadwick said, pointing to repeat behavior at Iceland’s Krafla.
Each eruption likely stiffens and compresses the crust around the magma body, so Axial has to inflate a bit more each cycle. That makes the seamount a clean test of how predictable repeat eruptions can be.
The pattern keeps wobbling. After 2015, uplift surged, faded to nearly zero by 2023, then seismicity jumped that fall, a “fundamental change in the magma supply,” as Chadwick put it.
Forecasts still lean on pattern spotting and a dose of speculation, which is why a new physics-based model is digesting real-time data from the cabled observatory. For the Oregon coast, this remains deep-sea drama rather than a public hazard, since Axial sits far offshore and past blasts didn’t trigger tsunamis.
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