Science
Where will the next pandemic begin? The Amazon rainforest offers troubling clues

The ten-year-old took off working down a dust highway within the coronary heart of the Amazon rainforest, turning cartwheels, enjoying tag and selecting fistfuls of untamed bougainvillea.
Small fires flared throughout Darah Girl Assunção Oliveira da Costa and her younger cousins as males burned bushes to make room for extra farmland. On the horizon loomed what was left of still-virgin jungle, dense and impossibly inexperienced. A series noticed roared from inside.
Within the three a long time since Darah Girl’s widowed grandmother first arrived on this distant stretch of northern Brazil, clearing the jungle by hand to construct a home for her 14 kids, the household has pushed deeper and deeper into the Amazon. It has been pushed by the frontier maxim that prosperity comes when nature succumbs to human dominion.
A settler slashes and burns a patch of land close to the sting of the rainforest in Maruaga, Brazil. Massive and small encroachments occur all through the Amazon on any given day. Since 1970, greater than 1 / 4 million sq. miles of Brazilian rainforest have been destroyed.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
“To outlive, we have to use what we have now,” stated Darah Girl’s father, 60-year-old Aladino Oliveira da Costa, who toppled old-growth forest to construct houses for every of his 4 older kids.
He and the remainder of the group have been prepping Darah Girl and her 42 cousins for all times on the literal fringe of civilization, educating them which bugs to keep away from, which crops remedy colds and which wild animals might be hunted and eaten.
Darah Girl Assunção Oliveira da Costa, 10, picks flowers close to her house in a jungle settlement referred to as Maruaga. The woman’s grandmother settled within the space about 30 years in the past, clearing the land and constructing a house for her 14 kids. The household has pushed deeper into the Amazon with every passing technology.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
But their rising outpost in northeastern Amazonas state — one in every of 1000’s of casual settlements all through the world’s largest rainforest — might imperil not solely their kids’s future but in addition that of your entire planet.
It’s not nearly bushes. It’s about viruses.
Extra world pandemics like COVID-19 are on the way in which, scientists say, and the subsequent one is more likely to emerge from a group like Darah Girl’s, the place individuals are encroaching on the pure world and erasing the buffer between themselves and habitats that existed lengthy earlier than a shovel reduce this earth.
The World They Inherit
That is the sixth in a sequence of occasional tales concerning the challenges younger individuals face in an more and more perilous world. Reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Middle.
From palm oil cultivation in Malaysia to mining in Africa or cattle ranching in Brazil, as individuals demolish forest, they not solely speed up world warming but in addition dramatically improve their danger of publicity to illness. Lurking in mammals and birds are about 1.6 million viruses, a few of which might be lethal after they leap to people. The stakes flip catastrophic if a virus proves transmissible between individuals.
That’s what occurred with COVID-19, which originated from shut contact between people and wild animals — whether or not it sprung from a pure setting or a laboratory.
The excessive rises of Manaus jut out of the Amazon rainforest alongside the Rio Negro in northwestern Brazil. Based within the nineteenth century as a middle for the rubber commerce, Manaus now could be a free import and export enterprise zone. Commerce and trade listed below are bustling.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
Scientists say that illness sizzling zones are multiplying from Africa to South America, and that deforestation has already triggered an increase in infectious illness. Zoologists have traced a couple of third of all identified outbreaks world wide to fast land use change, together with Nipah virus, malaria and Lyme illness. The issue is worsened by hotter temperatures introduced by local weather change that permit disease-carrying bugs to flourish.
Brazil has misplaced 270,000 sq. miles of the rainforest — the scale of two Germanys — since 1970. Darah Girl’s hamlet of Maruaga is rife with dangers for viral spillover, from omnipresent mosquitoes, roaming canines and chickens, and the wild sport her household recurrently eats. Contaminated bushmeat consumption in all probability sparked the 2013 Ebola outbreak within the West African nation of Guinea.
“Oh, it’s scrumptious!” Darah Girl stated of paca, a hunched, striped rodent that lives within the forest, as she and her cousins stopped to say good day to her father, who was smoothing mortar between concrete blocks, including a brand new room to their two-story home.
“However you may’t go overboard with the pepper,” Darah Girl continued. “There was this one time when he went to arrange the paca” — she caught her tongue out and panted — “and it was so sizzling!”
Her father, long-limbed and quick-witted like his daughter, smiled, placing his arm across the woman’s slender shoulders. “And tapir,” he added, referring to a jungle mammal that resembles a big pig with a trunk. “They’re additionally actually good.”
Birds choose a tree within the central sq. of Manaus, Brazil. Constructed on the banks of the Rio Negro, town of two million individuals stands in the midst of the Amazon jungle. It’s a bustling middle for commerce, trade and commerce.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angles Occasions)
Their household has already battled zoonotic sicknesses — the time period used to explain infectious illnesses transmitted between animals and people. Darah Girl’s father is a survivor of malaria and Leishmaniasis, a illness carried by sand flies that causes flesh-eating pores and skin sores.
When 40% of a land space has been destroyed, in accordance with Tom Gillespie, an Emory researcher targeted on environmental change and illness, the area hits a form of tipping level: Wild animals are pushed nearer to people for meals, and viruses start to unfold.
Even small decreases in forest cowl can drive up publicity to pathogens. In Brazil, Zika, the mosquito-borne virus that causes devastating delivery defects, is a primary instance. Scientists say deforestation has contributed to file warmth and droughts that trigger extra individuals to retailer water in open containers — wonderful breeding grounds for mosquitoes. With world warming, these vectors will in all probability creep north, breeding in components of North America, Europe and East Asia the place it had beforehand been too chilly.
It’s possible Darah Girl will confront one other pandemic in her lifetime. However her household isn’t frightened. When COVID-19 swept by way of the Amazon, her family members say they survived by sipping tea made with the bark of a forest vine. Darah Girl’s grandmother Iracema, 81, went into the jungle to gather the elements.
“It’s one thing that God placed on the face of this Earth,” Darah Girl’s aunt Ivaneide Assunção da Silva stated of the virus. “And God gave us the instruments to remedy ourselves.”
A primate seems to be out from its cage at a wildlife analysis facility in Manaus, Brazil. Veterinarians and researchers continually monitor and catalog pathogens discovered within the Amazon jungle. As individuals proceed to encroach on the rainforest, buffers between people and wildlife are erased, rising the opportunity of pathogen transmission between species.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
The group right here revolves across the small neo-Pentecostal church Iracema helped construct. The church’s nationwide leaders have claimed that the coronavirus is attributable to Devil and won’t damage those that are usually not afraid of it. The entire household has declined to take the vaccine.
Iracema believes the household will meet any problem, even a future pandemic, with the assistance of God — and the fruits of the forest.
“It’s vital to know concerning the forest,” she stated. “As a result of, once we reside right here, there’s nobody to assist us. We’ve all the time been right here fending for ourselves.”
::
100 miles south of Maruaga, within the sprawling metropolis of Manaus, a cemetery edges up in opposition to the rainforest, a sea of recent picket crosses giving method to a seemingly countless thicket of bushes.
Through the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when hospitals in Manaus ran out of oxygen and medical doctors might do not more than prescribe morphine to sufferers as they slowly asphyxiated, employees razed acres of jungle so backhoes might dig mass graves for 1000’s of lifeless.
1000’s of individuals in Manaus died in two separate surges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nearly everybody on this metropolis of two million individuals is aware of somebody who died a sluggish and excruciating dying after native hospitals ran out of oxygen. Officers bulldozed components of the jungle for area to bury the lifeless.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
If there’s anyplace on the planet that understands simply how devastating a pandemic might be, it’s Manaus, a metropolis of two million that rises out of the forest alongside a tributary of the Amazon River. Scientists are involved Manaus is also the breeding floor for the subsequent world epidemic, and say its poor efficiency responding to COVID-19 suggests it’s nowhere close to prepared for what could come.
“We weren’t ready,” stated nursing assistant Ludernilce Peixoto Costa, 43, who works at one of many metropolis’s important hospitals treating COVID-19 sufferers. Peixoto misplaced each of her dad and mom to COVID-19. Within the ICU the place she works, her father died holding her hand.
She worries about her youngest brother, 16, who has grow to be more and more withdrawn — one other COVID-19 orphan in a metropolis filled with them. She worries, too, about her 6-year-old daughter, Adrielly, who can’t keep in mind a life earlier than protecting masks and who says she needs to be a physician someday as a result of she has identified so many sick individuals.
Peixoto wonders: What if the virus by no means actually goes away, or one other one seems, and the younger must reside with pandemics endlessly?
“It scares me lots,” Peixoto stated on a current morning after one other exhausting evening shift. “It’s an unsure future.”
Ludernilce Peixoto Costa, 43, and her daughter Adrielly, 6, at their house on the outskirts of Manaus, Brazil. Peixoto works at one of many metropolis’s important hospitals treating COVID-19 sufferers. She misplaced each of her dad and mom to COVID-19.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
Others share that fear, together with Nelcicleide Vasconcelos Barbosa Reis, 39, who works for a Catholic charity in a casual settlement about three hours north of Manaus.
The city, with a reputation, Rumo Certo, that interprets to Proper Path, sprung up from the jungle lower than three a long time in the past and is now sandwiched between a sequence of cattle ranches and a lake shaped by a hydroelectric dam.
Vasconcelos was busy ensuring kids didn’t fall behind whereas faculties have been closed when final 12 months she, her husband and their 9-year-old daughter fell sick.
Her husband died in a Manaus hospital in December. Her daughter, Emanuelle, is shattered, spinning with anxiousness when anyone mentions the phrase “COVID.”
“It’s unfair,” Emanuelle tells her mom. “Couldn’t God see {that a} child wants her dad?”
Colleges have been closed for properly over a 12 months and there’s no signal she’s going again.
Throughout a current celebration on the church, the place Emanuelle floated round with a bunch of youngsters, together with a toddler in a T-shirt emblazoned with {a photograph} of his father, who additionally died from COVID-19, Vasconcelos wiped away tears. She questioned if kids’s lives would ever really feel “regular” once more.
“Both they are going to mature shortly or they are going to get misplaced,” she stated.
::
The capuchin monkey was out chilly, sprawled on a steel examination desk as veterinarian Alessandra Nava gently searched its legs for an excellent vein.
The monkey, an unlawful pet turned over to Brazil’s federal environmental safety company, was malnourished and underweight, however Nava lastly discovered a good website for a draw on its thigh. Blood crammed a vial, and because the monkey was carried again to its cage to sleep off the sedatives, Nava dropped the vial right into a tank of liquid nitrogen — one other pattern for her database.
Veterinarian Alessandra Nava attracts blood samples from a primate at a lab in Manaus. Nava is a researcher with the Oswaldo Cruz Basis, Brazil’s most distinguished scientific establishment, and tracks viruses within the Amazon jungle.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
Nava is a virus hunter. As a researcher with Oswaldo Cruz Basis, a government-run lab, she spends her days in and round Manaus taking samples from primates, rodents and bats. These specimens are serving to construct up the establishment’s biobank — a library of the viruses which can be circulating amongst animals within the jungle.
Not like conventional biobanks that retailer human samples for genomics and personalised medication, these repositories serve a extra common function: surveilling viral circulation. The scientists know that whereas reservoir hosts just like the monkey can harbor many viruses with out ever falling sick, when these viruses make their approach into people, they’ll set off a disastrous outbreak.
Scientists like Nava stalk and examine the pathogens in hopes of outsmarting them. If a mysterious case of illness have been to look in a human, lab employees might sequence the virus’ genome and attempt to match it to a virus within the biobank, rushing up efforts to include it.
There are related initiatives in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia — the place scientists fear a couple of Nipah virus spillover — and the Congo basin, the place Ebola and Marburg stay fixed threats.
Internationally, the International Virome Undertaking is probably the most strong instance: an enormous analysis venture that goals to catalog each virus that might threaten people. Dennis Carroll, the researcher who runs it, believes that if such an information set had been obtainable prior to now, the coronavirus that spilled into people some two years in the past would have been recognized a lot quicker.
However many zoologists think about it too bold. Estimates counsel the venture would value about $1.6 billion over a decade to establish 75% of all of the world’s viruses. And even a library of all of them wouldn’t reveal which might be transmitted between people. Some scientists suppose a wiser method is convincing particular teams of individuals to undertake much less dangerous behaviors: wet-market employees, mink farmers, chimpanzee hunters — and maybe households residing on the perimeter of the forest, like Darah Girl’s.
A lot of the analysis into zoonotic spillover has thus far targeted on Asia and Africa, however there’s rising consideration on the Amazon. Brazil misplaced an estimated 5 million acres of its part of the forest in 2020, and scientists warn that part might be decreased by greater than 40% by 2050. Outbreaks of zoonotic illness have elevated globally within the final 30 years, and the virus that can mutate to trigger the subsequent one, although maybe undetected, is already on the market.
A sloth takes refuge within the hair of a researcher with the Oswaldo Cruz Basis, Brazil’s most distinguished scientific establishment. As individuals proceed to encroach on the rainforest, buffers between people and wildlife are erased, rising the opportunity of pathogen transmission between species. Scientific researchers monitor and catalog pathogens present in animals from the Brazilian jungle.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
“They reduce down a bit of pristine forest and construct a shopping center, and folks suppose it’s progress,” Nava stated. “However while you do this, you’re leaving a complete group of animals with out a house.”
Nava, who has a younger daughter, has been including photo voltaic panels and cisterns to her home to make her household extra self-sufficient within the face of future disasters. As she commutes round Manaus, with its city sprawl ever encroaching on the forest round it, she thinks about her child: “What sort of planet are we leaving her?”
If individuals actually care about avoiding future pandemics, she stated, they are going to notice that the most effective method just isn’t her personal — attempting to find out about viruses earlier than they take root in people — however to cease their unfold altogether.
“It’s not about trying to find the subsequent virus,” she stated. “Now we have to cease deforestation proper now.”
::
Aladino Oliveira da Costa, 60, and his daughter Darah Girl, 10, speak with a reporter exterior their house within the village of Maruaga. Oliviera cleared old-growth bushes from the jungle to construct houses for every of his 4 older kids. He hopes to sometime do the identical for Darah Girl.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
Oliveira bristles at options that households like his are doing one thing fallacious by increasing into the jungle.
He helps Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right firebrand who has allowed a rise of logging, mining and cattle farming within the Amazon — actions that scientists say are linked to the emergence of infectious illness.
Oliveira says if scientists need Brazil to cease slicing down the rainforest, they need to compensate these residing there. “Pay me to protect it and I’ll protect it,” he stated on a current morning, sipping espresso in an open-air gazebo along with his spouse and his spouse’s mom whereas Darah Girl sat in Sunday college on the group’s little church.
“Coming from the surface, you need the forest to stay standing,” he stated. “That’s great. However I reside right here within the forest. And I don’t survive on leaves and lizards.”
Round him have been indicators of how the expansion of his household’s compound has already altered a land that lower than a century in the past was untouched and pristine. A paved highway constructed lately is already lined with small shops and cattle ranches. Close by, building employees are getting ready to clear extra forest to construct a hospital. Even the place the plush inexperienced is comparatively undisturbed, thick electrical traces stretch over the cover, buzzing day and evening.
The youngsters trickled out of the church, Darah Girl clutching a Bible. She accepted kisses from all of the adults — together with her grandmother Iracema, who a long time in the past pushed again the forest to make a house — then sat down along with her cousins for a breakfast of fruitcake.
Greater than her elders, Darah Girl appeared to intuit the nuance of deforestation. Simply days earlier than, she had performed on lots that was being cleared.
It had as soon as been a dense universe of life — towering bushes, cacophonous birds, legions of uncommon bugs and animals. However now it seemed as if it had been flattened by a bomb, cleared of any helpful timber and blackened by a still-smoldering fireplace.
“I get type of unhappy,” Darah Girl stated. “As a result of, like, the forest is one thing I’ve beloved since I used to be little. They usually’re deforesting, proper? It’s destroying nature.”
A person burning jungle in a settlement named Maruaga in Brazil.
(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Occasions)
“However it’s additionally going to assist,” she stated, exhibiting a baby’s grasp of slash-and-burn agriculture. “This land they’re burning, these bushes, the vitamins from what they burn will go into the soil. And it’ll assist to plant new issues — like orange bushes, guava bushes — and folks can construct homes.”
On this Sunday morning, as she and her household completed up and retired to their house, smoke from farmers clearing extra land once more crammed the sky, an indication of each progress and peril. Darah Girl was so used to it, she barely observed.
Extra from ‘The World They Inherit’
Occasions workers author Linthicum and particular correspondent Ionova reported from Maruaga. Workers author Baumgaertner reported from Los Angeles.
(That is the sixth in a sequence of occasional tales concerning the challenges younger individuals face in an more and more perilous world. Reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Middle.)

Science
Cancer diagnosis and a new book fuel questions about Biden's decision to run in 2024

WASHINGTON — The revelation that former President Biden has advanced prostate cancer generated more questions than answers on Monday, prompting debate among experts in the oncology community over the likely progression of his disease and resurfacing concerns in Washington over his decision last year to run for reelection.
Biden’s private office said Sunday afternoon that he had been diagnosed earlier in the week with an “aggressive form” of the cancer that had already spread to his bones, after urinary symptoms led to the discovery of a nodule on his prostate.
But it was not made clear whether Biden, 82, had been testing his prostate-specific antigens, known as PSA levels, during his presidency — and if so whether those results had indicated an elevated risk of cancer while he was still in office or during his campaign for reelection.
Biden’s diagnosis comes at a difficult time for the former president, as scrutiny grows over his decision to run for a second term last year — and whether it cost the Democrats the White House. Biden ultimately dropped out of the race after a devastating debate performance with Donald Trump laid bare widespread concerns over his age and health, leaving his successor on the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris — little time to run her own campaign.
A book set to publish this week titled “Original Sin,” by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, details efforts by Biden’s aides to shield the effects of his aging from the public and the press. The cancer diagnosis only intensified scrutiny over Biden’s health and questions as to whether he and his team were honest about it with the public.
“I think those conversations are going to happen,” said David Axelrod, a former senior advisor to President Obama.
President Trump, asked about Biden’s diagnosis during an Oval Office event Monday, said it was “a very, very sad situation” and that he felt “badly about it.”
But he also questioned why the cancer wasn’t caught earlier, and why the public wasn’t notified earlier, tying the situation to questions he has long raised about Biden’s mental fitness to serve as president.
PSA tests are not typically recommended for men over 70 due to the risk of false positive results or of associated treatments causing more harm than good to older patients, who are more likely to die of other causes first.
But annual physicals for sitting presidents — especially of Biden’s age — are more comprehensive than those for private citizens. And a failure to test for elevated PSA levels could have missed the progression of the disease.
A letter from Biden’s White House physician from February of last year made no mention of PSA testing, unlike the most recent letter detailing the results of Trump’s latest physical, which references a normal measurement. Biden’s current aides did not respond to requests for comment on whether his office would further detail his diagnostic testing history.
Even if his doctors had tested for PSA levels at the time, results may not have picked up an aggressive form of the cancer, experts said.
Some specialists in the field said it was possible, if rare, for Biden’s cancer to emerge and spread since his last physical in the White House. Roughly 10% of patients who are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer are found with an advanced form of the disease that has metastasized to other parts of the body.
Dr. Mark Litwin, the chair of UCLA Urology, said it is in the nature of aggressive prostate cancers to grow quickly. “So it is likely that this tumor began more recently,” he said.
Litwin said he does not doubt that Biden would have been screened for elevated PSA levels. But, he said, he could be among those patients whose cancers do not produce elevated PSA levels or whose more aggressive cancers rapidly grow and metastasize within a matter of months.
“The fact that he has metastatic disease at diagnosis, to me, as an expert in the area and as a clinician taking care of guys with prostate cancer all the time, just says that he is unfortunate,” Litwin said.
Litwin and other experts in prostate cancer from USC, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cedars-Sinai and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute all told The Times that Biden’s diagnosis — at least based on publicly available information — was not incredibly unusual, and similar to diagnoses received by older American men all the time.
They said he and his doctors absolutely would have discussed testing his PSA levels, given his high level of care as president. But they also said it would have been well within medical best practices for him to decide with those doctors to stop getting tested given his age.
Dr. Howard Sandler, chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Cedars-Sinai, said he sees three potential explanations for Biden’s diagnosis.
One is that Biden and his doctors made a decision “to not screen any longer, which would be well within the standard of care” given Biden’s age, he said.
A second is that Biden’s was tested, and his PSA level “was elevated, maybe not dramatically but a little bit elevated, but they said, ‘Well, we’re not gonna really investigate it,’” again because of Biden’s age, Sandler said.
The third, which Sandler said was “less likely,” is that Biden’s PSA was checked “and was fine, but he ended up with an aggressive prostate cancer that doesn’t produce much PSA” and so wasn’t captured.
Zeke Emanuel, an oncologist serving as vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and a former health policy official in the Biden administration, told MSNBC that Biden has likely had cancer for “more than several years.”
“He did not develop it in the last 100, 200 days. He had it while he was president. He probably had it at the start of his presidency, in 2021,” Emanuel said.
But Litwin, who said he is a friend of Emanuel’s, said most men in their 70s or 80s have some kind of prostate cancer, even if it is just “smoldering along” — there but not particularly aggressive or quickly spreading — and unlikely to be the cause of their death.
He said Biden may well have had some similar form of cancer in his prostate for a long time, but that he did not believe that the aggressive form that has metastasized would have been around for as long as Emanuel seemed to suggest.
Departing Rome aboard Air Force Two, Vice President JD Vance told reporters he was sending his best wishes to the former president, but expressed concern that his recent diagnosis underscored concerns over Biden’s condition that dogged his presidency.
“Whether the right time to have this conversation is now or in the future, we really do need to be honest about whether the former president was capable of doing the job,” Vance said. “I don’t think that he was in good enough health. In some ways, I blame him less than I blame the people around him.”
Trump’s medical team has also faced questions of transparency.
When Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 during his first term, at the height of the pandemic, he was closer to death than his White House acknowledged at the time. And his doctors and aides regularly use superlatives to describe the health of the 78-year-old president, with Karoline Leavitt, his White House press secretary, referring to him as “perfect” on Monday.
“Cancer touches us all,” Biden posted on social media alongside a photo with his wife, Jill Biden, in his first remarks on his diagnosis.
“Like so many of you, Jill and I have learned that we are strongest in the broken places,” he added. “Thank you for lifting us up with love and support.”
Science
A mysterious, highly active undersea volcano near California could erupt later this year. What scientists expect
• Axial Seamount is the best-monitored submarine volcano in the world.
• It’s the most active undersea volcano closest to California.
• It could erupt by the end of the year.
A mysterious and highly active undersea volcano off the Pacific Coast could erupt by the end of this year, scientists say.
Nearly a mile deep and about 700 miles northwest of San Francisco, the volcano known as Axial Seamount is drawing increasing scrutiny from scientists who only discovered its existence in the 1980s.
Located in a darkened part of the northeast Pacific Ocean, the submarine volcano has erupted three times since its discovery — in 1998, 2011 and 2015 — according to Bill Chadwick, a research associate at Oregon State University and an expert on the volcano.
Fortunately for residents of California, Oregon and Washington, Axial Seamount doesn’t erupt explosively, so it poses zero risk of any tsunami.
“Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, Crater Lake — those kind of volcanoes have a lot more gas and are more explosive in general. The magma is more viscous,” Chadwick said. “Axial is more like the volcanoes in Hawaii and Iceland … less gas, the lava is very fluid, so the gas can get out without exploding.”
The destructive force of explosive eruptions is legendary: when Mt. Vesuvius blew in 79 AD, it wiped out the ancient Roman city of Pompeii; when Mt. St. Helens erupted in 1980, 57 people died; and when the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai volcano in Tonga’s archipelago exploded in 2022 — a once-in-a-century event — the resulting tsunami, which reached a maximum height of 72 feet, caused damage across the Pacific Ocean and left at least six dead.
Axial Seamount, by contrast, is a volcano that, during eruptions, oozes lava — similar to the type of eruptions in Kilauea on the Big Island of Hawaii. As a result, Axial’s eruptions are not noticeable to people on land.
It’s a very different story underwater.
Heat plumes from the eruption will rise from the seafloor — perhaps half a mile — but won’t reach the surface, said William Wilcock, professor of oceanography at the University of Washington.
Jason is a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) system designed to allow scientists to have access to the seafloor without leaving the ship.
(Dave Caress/MBARI)
The outermost layer of the lava flow will almost immediately cool and form a crust, but the interior of the lava flow can remain molten for a time, Chadwick said. “In some places … the lava comes out slower and piles up, and then there’s all this heat that takes a long time to dissipate. And on those thick flows, microbial mats can grow, and it almost looks like snow over a landscape.”
Sea life can die if buried by the lava, which also risks destroying or damaging scientific equipment installed around the volcano to detect eruptions and earthquakes. But the eruption probably won’t affect sea life such as whales, which are “too close to the surface” to be bothered by the eruption, Wilcock said.
Also, eruptions at Axial Seamount aren’t expected to trigger a long-feared magnitude 9.0 earthquake on the Cascadia subduction zone. Such an earthquake would probably spawn a catastrophic tsunami for Washington, Oregon and California’s northernmost coastal counties. That’s because Axial Seamount is located too far away from that major fault.
Axial Seamount is one of countless volcanoes that are underwater. Scientists estimate that 80% of Earth’s volcanic output — magma and lava — occurs in the ocean.
Axial Seamount has drawn intense interest from scientists. It is now the best-monitored underwater volcano in the world.
The volcano is a prolific erupter in part because of its location, Chadwick said. Not only is it perched on a ridge where the Juan de Fuca and Pacific tectonic plates spread apart from each other — creating new seafloor in the process — but the volcano is also planted firmly above a geological “hot spot” — a region where plumes of superheated magma rise toward the Earth’s surface.
For Chadwick and other researchers, frequent eruptions offer the tantalizing opportunity to predict volcanic eruptions weeks to months in advance — something that’s very difficult to do with other volcanoes. (There’s also much less likelihood anyone will get mad if scientists get it wrong.)

A three-dimensional topographic depiction showing the summit caldera of Axial Seamount, a highly active undersea volcano off the Pacific Coast. Warmer colors indicate shallower surfaces; cooler colors indicate deeper surfaces.
(Susan Merle / Oregon State University)
“For a lot of volcanoes around the world, they sit around and are dormant for long periods of time, and then suddenly they get active. But this one is pretty active all the time, at least in the time period we’ve been studying it,” Chadwick said. “If it’s not erupting, it’s getting ready for the next one.”
Scientists know this because they’ve spotted a pattern.
“Between eruptions, the volcano slowly inflates — which means the seafloor rises. … And then during an eruption, it will, when the magma comes out, the volcano deflates and the seafloor drops down,” Wilcock said.
Eruptions, Chadwick said, are “like letting some air out of the balloon. And what we’ve seen is that it has inflated to a similar level each time when an eruption is triggered,” he said.
Chadwick and fellow scientist Scott Nooner predicted the volcano’s 2015 eruption seven months before it happened after they realized the seafloor was inflating quite quickly and linearly. That “made it easier to extrapolate into the future to get up to this threshold that it had reached before” eruption, Chadwick said.
But making predictions since then has been more challenging. Chadwick started making forecast windows in 2019, but around that time, the rate of inflation started slowing down, and by the summer of 2023, “it had almost stopped. So then it was like, ‘Who knows when it’s going to erupt?’”

A deep-sea octopus explores the lava flows four months after the Axial Seamount volcano erupted in 2015.
(Bill Chadwick, Oregon State University / Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution / National Science Foundation)
But in late 2023, the seafloor slowly began inflating again. Since the start of 2024, “it’s been kind of cranking along at a pretty steady rate,” he said. He and Nooner, of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, made the latest eruption prediction in July 2024 and posted it to their blog. Their forecast remains unchanged.
“At the rate of inflation it’s going, I expect it to erupt by the end of the year,” Chadwick said.
But based on seismic data, it’s not likely the volcano is about to erupt imminently. While scientists haven’t mastered predicting volcanic eruptions weeks or months ahead of time, they do a decent job of forecasting eruptions minutes to hours to days ahead of time, using clues like an increased frequency of earthquakes.
At this point, “we’re not at the high rate of seismicity that we saw before 2015,” Chadwick said. “It wouldn’t shock me if it erupted tomorrow, but I’m thinking that it’s not going to be anytime soon on the whole.”
He cautioned that his forecast still amounts to an experiment, albeit one that has become quite public. “I feel like it’s more honest that way, instead of doing it in retrospect,” Chadwick said in a presentation in November. The forecast started to garner attention after he gave a talk at the American Geophysical Union meeting in December.
On the bright side, he said, “there’s no problem of having a false alarm or being wrong,” because the predictions won’t affect people on land.
If the predictions are correct, “maybe there’s lessons that can be applied to other more hazardous volcanoes around the world,” Chadwick said. As it stands now, though, making forecasts for eruptions for many volcanoes on land “are just more complicated,” without having a “repeatable pattern like we’re seeing at this one offshore.”
Scientists elsewhere have looked at other ways to forecast undersea eruptions. Scientists began noticing a repeatable pattern in the rising temperature of hydrothermal vents at a volcano in the East Pacific and the timing of three eruptions in the same spot over the last three decades. “And it sort of worked,” Chadwick said.
Plenty of luck allowed scientists to photograph the eruption of the volcanic site known as “9 degrees 50 minutes North on the East Pacific Rise,” which was just the third time scientists had ever captured images of active undersea volcanism.
But Chadwick doubts researchers will be fortunate enough to videotape Axial Seamount’s eruption.
Although scientists will be alerted to it by the National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative Regional Cabled Array — a sensor system operated by the University of Washington — getting there in time will be a challenge.
“You have to be in the right place at the right time to catch an eruption in action, because they don’t last very long. The ones at Axial probably last a week or a month,” Chadwick said.
And then there’s the difficulty of getting a ship and a remotely operated vehicle or submarine to capture the images. Such vessels are generally scheduled far in advance, perhaps a year or a year and a half out, and projects are tightly scheduled.
Chadwick last went to the volcano in 2024 and is expected to go out next in the summer of 2026. If his predictions are correct, Axial Seamount will have already erupted.
Science
Firefighters make significant progress on Mono County blaze that prompted evacuations
Firefighters made steady progress fighting a slow-moving brush fire near Yosemite National Park and Mammoth Mountain on Sunday.
The Inn fire began Thursday afternoon off Highway 395 in Mono County. By nightfall, it had grown to over 500 acres, prompting evacuations spanning much of Mono City and Lundy Canyon.
But as weather improved into Saturday evening, CalTrans reopened the highway to one-way traffic, and the Mono County Sheriff’s Office downgraded the evacuation orders to advisories, allowing residents to return home. As of 10 a.m. Sunday, the fire sat at 726 acres.
Overnight, fire crews with Cal Fire, Inyo National Forest and other local departments upped containment from 0% to 15%. In an update Sunday morning, officials described the fire behavior as “minimal, with creeping and smoldering observed through much of the day.” But, they said “significant work” remained to contain the blaze.
Containment began along the north edge of the fire as bulldozers cleared lines in the brush to stop its spread. Ground crews hand-dug containment lines along the majority of the remaining perimeter, where the terrain is too rugged for heavy equipment, said Lisa Cox, public affairs officer for Inyo National Forest.
“We can’t get dozers up on the west flank of the fire,” Cox said. “It’s extremely rough, rugged territory.”
There were five helicopters, 16 engines and 686 personnel assigned to the fire as of Sunday morning.
With mild weather expected for the next few days, fire officials don’t expect additional road closures or evacuation orders.
Mono Lake — which sits higher than 6,300 feet in elevation and reflects the Sierras across its nearly 70-square-mile surface — is a popular destination for hikers, kayakers and bird watchers.
As visitors head to the area for the holiday weekend, Cox urged patience and caution.
“Slow down; don’t be in a hurry. … There’s going to be traffic backup,” she said. “There are still firefighters working along the entire highway.”
The Inn fire is one of five active blazes in the state, according to Cal Fire, and one of 27 that started within the last week, as warmer temperatures begin to usher in California’s fire season.
-
World1 week ago
Severe storms kill at least 21 across US Midwest and South
-
News1 week ago
Watch: Chaos as Mexican Navy ship collides with Brooklyn Bridge, sailors seen dangling – Times of India
-
News1 week ago
Maps: 3.8-Magnitude Earthquake Strikes Southern California
-
Politics1 week ago
Texas AG Ken Paxton sued over new rule to rein in 'rogue' DAs by allowing him access to their case records
-
Politics1 week ago
Afghan Christian pastor pleads with Trump, warns of Taliban revenge after admin revokes refugee protections
-
Politics1 week ago
Trump, alongside first lady, to sign bill criminalizing revenge porn and AI deepfakes
-
World1 week ago
Portuguese PM’s party set to win general election, fall short of majority
-
News1 week ago
Video: One Person Dead in Explosion Outside Palm Springs Fertility Clinic