Top Comments: Volcano Predicted to Erupt Off the Coast of Oregon in 2025 – Daily Kos
Here at Top Comments we welcome longtime as well as brand new Daily Kos readers to join us at 10pm Eastern. We strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site’s best, funniest, most mojo’d & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-), so we can credit you with the find!From Science News:An undersea volcano is likely to erupt sometime in 2025.This much advance notice is a big deal, because forecasting eruptions more than hours ahead is “pretty unique,” says geophysicist William Chadwick. But 470 kilometers off the Oregon coast and over a kilometer beneath the waves, a volcano known as Axial Seamount ticks all the boxes that hint at imminent activity, Chadwick and his colleagues reported December 10 at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C.For the past decade, a suite of devices have been monitoring Axial’s every action — rumbling, shaking, swelling, tilting — and delivering real-time data via a seafloor cable. It’s “the most well-instrumented submarine volcano on the planet,” says Mark Zumberge, a geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who was not involved in the work.But in November, a particular milestone caught Chadwick’s eye: Axial’s surface had ballooned to nearly the same height as it had before its last eruption in 2015 — fortuitously, just months after monitoring began. Ballooning is a sign that magma has accumulated underground and is building pressure.When I first saw the title of the article, I thought this was a new volcano, but the last quoted paragraph makes clear that this has been an active volcano for a while now. The researchers have been seeking patterns by comparing the current swelling of the submerged volcano and the sequence of pre-eruption earthquakes with the same observations from its eruption in 2015.If the prediction is correct, and the volcano does erupt, it will be the first time such a prediction was made with weeks or months of lead-time, as opposed to just hours. If such long-term prediction of volcanic eruptions becomes routine, it could save many lives in populated areas. There are many caveats, however. Eruption predictions based on patterns from observed eruptions in the past could turn out to be incorrect if the pattern happens to change, for instance. Still, if this prediction comes true, and Axial Seamount does erupt, it will be a great victory for volcanologists.Comments are below the fold.Highlighted by Paul C:This comment by OdiousHarpy in Walter Einenkel’s front page post on Nancy Mace’s anti-trans antics backfiring.Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
