The OOIFB hosted a successful Town Hall event at the 2025 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Conference in New Orleans, LA. The Town Hall took place on Monday, December 15, 2025, from 1-2pm CST, with over 85 scientists, students, resource managers, educators and others in attendance to discuss recent research discoveries and the status of Axial Seamount in the Northeast Pacific. Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano located ~300 miles off the Oregon coast, is the most active submarine volcano in the NE Pacific and is displaying behavior indicative of an impending eruption. The Ocean Observatories Initiative’s (OOI) Regional Cabled Array, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), hosts over 20 multidisciplinary cabled instruments at Axial and provides real-time monitoring, which will illuminate key processes before, during, and after this eruption. Co-registered measurements of earthquakes, seafloor deformation, and hydrothermal activity are key to understanding mid-ocean ridges that form the largest mountain chain on Earth.
Featuring keynote presentations on the current status of Axial Seamount, early career scientist lightning presentations, and a community discussion forum, this Town Hall highlighted ongoing and innovative research initiatives and provided monitoring updates. Additionally, upcoming OOIFB opportunities, including the February 2026 Ocean Sciences Meeting Town Hall event, Fall 2026 OOIFB Community Workshop focused on the OOI’s Global Arrays, upcoming recruitment efforts for the OOIFB and Data Systems Committee (DSC), details on a NSF-funded cybersecurity training workshop (using OOI/JupyterHub), and information on the OOI Zendodo community were also shared.
Town Hall Agenda:
- Event Welcome, Dr. Dax Soule, OOIFB Chair
- Keynote presentations (~8 min each):
- Dr. Bill Chadwick (Oregon State University): An update on inflation and seismicity since 2015 and implications for eruption forecasting
- Dr. Graham Kent (University of Nevada, Reno): Axial volcano meets ‘Ginsu’ knife: Surprising insights from the 2019 3D seismic reflection survey
- Dr. William Wilcock (University of Washington): The Cascadia Offshore Subduction Zone Observatory (COSZO) infrastructure project
- Lightning presentations (~3min each)
- Peifeng Wang (The Chinese University of Hong Kong): Relative seismic velocity changes at Axial Seamount
- Camille Sullivan (University of North Carolina, Wilmington): Assessing the use of a cabled bottom pressure recorder as a new reference site for mobile pressure recorder surveys at Axial Seamount
- Meritxell Colet (Columbia University): Insights into caldera-ridge interactions at Axial Seamount from machine-learning analysis of cabled and temporary OBS data
- Maochuan Zhang (University of Washington): Real-Time focal mechanisms at Axial Seamount via deep learning
- Community Discussion and Q&A
Event questions? Please contact Holly Morin (holly@ooifb.org)
If you have questions or comments about Axial Seamount, and/or NSF OOI operations, data access, opportunities, etc., please add those here and we will continue to catalogue and respond to them.
