The most active volcano in the Pacific Northwest may explode as early as tomorrow, according to a dire warning from scientists.

Located more than 4,900 feet below the Pacific Ocean’s surface and 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, the Axial Seamount is a mile-wide underwater volcano.

Magma surging to the surface has generated a huge increase in earthquakes beneath the seamount, according to researchers from the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative.

William Wilcock, a marine geophysicist and lecturer at the University of Washington, claims that the seafloor has expanded to its pre-eruption level from 2015.

The bulge indicates the accumulation of extremely hot magma under the surface.

Source: Freepik
“At the moment, there are a couple hundred earthquakes a day, but that’s still a lot less than we saw before the previous eruption,” Wilcock explained.

According to the marine geophysicist, “I would say it was going to erupt sometime later (this year) or early 2026, but it could be tomorrow, because it’s completely unpredictable.”

When the Axial Seamount last erupted in 2015, it caused almost 8,000 earthquakes, 400-foot-thick lava flows, and a nearly eight-foot drop in the ocean floor.

In only the past month, the number of earthquakes in the area has increased significantly, with a notable peak in activity occurring on April 13.

The number of daily earthquakes beneath the seamount has been increasing gradually since May 6. Several of the

Experts suggest that human towns along the West Coast won’t be in danger if Axial Seamount blows in the coming days.

It has little effect on land-based seismic activity and is too deep and distant from the coast for anyone to even notice when it erupts.

However, as lava flows out of the seafloor volcano, the number of underwater earthquakes is predicted to increase dramatically during this event, from the couple hundred that occur every day currently to 10,000 within a 24-hour period, according to Interesting Engineering.