Seismic Features at a Seamount - Application

Your Objective

Use earthquake data from Axial Seamount in April 2015 to determine when the diking-eruptive event occurred.

Make a prediction about what kind of patterns in earthquake magnitude and location you may observe at the time of a diking-eruptive event.
Compare patterns in the data below to determine what and if there are relationships over time at the Axial Seamount.

Automatically select:

Data Tips

When the site loads, you are able to see all of the earthquake data from 6 hours on April 23, 2015 (00:00-06:00 UTC). You can interact with the data by:

Selecting a different part of the time series to explore the data in ways that interest you by moving the highlighted section of the bottom graph to the right or left.
Zooming in and out of the data to look at different time scales that interest you by changing the width of the highlighted section of the bottom graph (it loads with all of the data highlighted).
Zooming in and out of the map to see more or less of the area of the ocean the earthquakes occurred.

Note, the color denotes earthquake depth, with darker blues representing deeper depths (up to 5km) and dark red representing shallower depths (0km). The yellows are in-between. The circles on the map are sized by the earthquake magnitude.

Questions for Thought

Orientation Questions

Across what geographic area are you able to observe earthquake data in this map?
What is the range of earthquake magnitudes in these data?
When do you see the largest earthquakes along this time series across the diking-eruptive event?

Interpretation Questions

During what time frame did the diking-eruptive event occur?
What evidence do you have of a relationship between earthquake magnitude and timing during the diking-eruptive event at the Axial Seamount?
How does this relationship support what you previously knew about seismic activity at seamounts?
What questions do you still have about seismic activity at seamounts during eruption events?

Background Information

Click on the images below to learn more about where and how the dataset above was collected.

Dataset Information

The data used in this activity is from: Wilcock, W., Waldhauser, F., & Tolstoy, M. (2016). Catalogs of earthquake recorded on Axial Seamount from January, 2015 through November, 2015 (investigators William Wilcock, Maya Tolstoy, Felix Waldhauser). (Version 1) [Data set]. Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA). https://doi.org/10.1594/ieda/323843
The earthquake catalog data are publicly available in the Marine Geoscience Data System. The data used are from the Axial_DD_n12.dat data file.
To learn more about this diking-eruptive event, see Wilcock, W., M. Tolstoy, F. Waldhauser, C. Garcia1, Y. Joe Tan, D. Bohnenstiehl, J. Caplan-Auerbach, R. Dziak, A. Arnulf, and M. Mann. (2016) Seismic constraints on caldera dynamics from the 2015 Axial Seamount eruption. Science. 354(6318): 1395-1399. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aah5563