Will Axial Seamount Erupt Again Soon?

A new example Python notebook activity

As you may have heard, the seafloor at the Axial Seamount volcano continues to uplift, and is about to pass the level it reached during the last eruption in 2015. In addition, earthquake activity has increased throughout the fall. Both indicators point to a likely eruption in the near future. However, how near remains a key scientific question.

If you’re interested in following along, you can check out Bill Chadwick’s real-time bottom pressure forecasts (which use OOI’s BOTPT sensors) and William Wilcock’s Axial earthquake catalog (generated from OOI’s seismic sensors).

But to bring these two datasets together, you can also check out our new Python activity notebook, developed by Sage.

With a few snippets of code, this notebook demonstrates how to:

• Use erddapy to download bottom pressure data from the OOI data server
• Roughly average pressure data to remove tidal signals and calculate long-term uplift rates
• Load, calculate, and plot daily earthquake counts from Wilcock’s earthquake catalog
• Load and plot vent fluid temperature from a new sensor to see if there’s any correlation
• Create a combined plot with several variables to help students view past relationships and make future predictions.

As always, this notebook is a prototype activity. It includes some example code, along with a few orientation and interpretation questions at the end to guide students in developing scientific data descriptions based on the graphs. You will likely want to adapt the questions or scientific background to meet your course’s learning goals.

Alternatively, as the eruption nears, you might find this notebook useful to periodically run as a way to demonstrate the latest real-time data to your students.

You can view the Real-time Data from Axial Seamount notebook on GitHub, or you can use this link to open it up directly in Google Collab to run it yourself.

If you have any questions or comments on the notebook, please reach out to Sage.