Bill Chadwick, Oregon State University/Copyright Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution A snow blower vent at the Axial Seamount released microorganisms that are believed to bloom after an eruption.
A team of scientists studying last year's eruption of Axial Seamount now says that the undersea volcano some 250 miles off the Oregon coast gave off clear signals hours before the eruption. The findings, plus those from scientists who mapped the lava flow, are published this week in three separate articles Geoscience. Using sensors deployed directly on the seafloor at the summit of Axial, the scientists found that the rate of seismic activity at Axial Seamount increased steadily over several years leading up to the eruption in April 2011. The researchers also picked up a sudden increase in sound energy associated with seismic activity 2.5 hours before the eruption began. "Our data suggest that access to real-time seismic data, projected to be available in the near future, might facilitate short-term forecasting and provide sufficient lead time to prepare .. instrumentation before future intrusion and eruption events,” one of the published reports states. David Butterfield, an oceanographer with the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean at UW, is a co-author of the paper and Bob Dziak, Oregon State University, is the lead author.
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