Chadwick was calm enough to leave for a three-week expedition to Guam on May 7 to explore the Mariana Trench – though he noted that those following Oregon's undersea volcano joke that it's most likely to erupt when its least convenient. "May is looking like a pretty inconvenient time for Axial to erupt ... so you never know!"
Scott Nooner, a professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, who co-runs the Axial Seamount blog with Chadwick, said on May 16 that there's no new news.
"We are still waiting for activity to pick up there," he said.
Dating of the flows around the seamount shows that it has erupted about 50 times over the last 800 years, about once every 15 years on average.
A series of instruments around the volcano indicate a reservoir has been refilling with magma since its last eruption, gradually inflating so that it's bulging upward.
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