November 18, 2025 | 01:10 pm
TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Researchers estimate that the underwater volcano off the coast of Oregon, Axial Seamount, is likely to erupt in mid to late 2026. Previously, scientists predicted the eruption could occur in 2025. However, the latest data shows that the ground inflation process is occurring more slowly than initially thought.
Last December, scientists stated that Axial Seamount was nearing inflation thresholds similar to the conditions before the eruption a decade ago, but now they believe the eruption will occur later, around mid to late 2026.
This underwater volcano is located on the Juan de Fuca Ridge, the divergent plate boundary off the northwest coast of the US Pacific, and is known as the most active underwater volcano in the northeast Pacific Ocean.
"After successfully forecasting the 2015 eruption at Axial, we've been attempting to forecast the next since then," said Bill Chadwick, a researcher at Oregon State University, quoted from the Live Science report.
In a presentation at the American Geophysical Union in December 2024, he explained that eruptions at Axial are usually preceded by high seismic activity and stable ground inflation due to magma ascent.
Post-2015 eruption inflation had declined to almost zero by mid-2023. However, in the fall of 2023, the inflation rate and seismic activity increased again.
Chadwick wrote in his abstract that "based on current trends, and the assumption that Axial will be primed to erupt when it reaches the 2015 inflation threshold, our current eruption forecast window is between now (July 2024) and the end of 2025." By the end of 2024, Axial inflation had reached 95 percent of the level before the 2015 eruption.
However, in April 2025, the inflation rate slowed again. In a blog update on October 27, Chadwick stated the need for a revision of the previous prediction. "It will take a bit more time than we anticipated to reach the same inflation threshold that the volcano reached before the last eruption," he wrote. "At the current rate of inflation, we won't get to that higher inflation threshold until mid-to-late 2026."
According to Chadwick, Axial Seamount behaves similarly to the Krafla volcano in Iceland, whose inflation threshold increases slightly at each eruption. He said the 2015 threshold was about 30 centimeters higher than in 2011, so it may require another 20 centimeters of increase before the next eruption. "It's really just an educated guess, but also based on the previous behavior of volcanoes like Krafla," he said.
Chadwick added that each eruption can make the surrounding crust more compressed, so the magma requires a larger inflation to resurface, although the increase in the threshold will not be limitless.
He also said that current forecasting efforts still rely on historical patterns, but the latest physical models they developed are starting to accurately predict past eruptions. Since November 10, the team has been using this model to analyze real-time Axial data, but the results will only be published after the next eruption.
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