UNDERSEA VOLCANO. Like astronomers who team up to view supernova eruptions at a variety of wavelengths, geophysicists have been able to mount an in-depth study of the eruption in January 1998 of the Axial Volcano, lying 1500 m underwater about 200 miles off the Oregon-Washington coast (see figure at Physics News Graphics). Axial, which is a large volcanic edifice lying along a rift zone in the Northeast Pacific where new ocean floor is being created, is one of the few places on the worldwide 60,000-km mid-ocean ridge system (Iceland and the Azores are other examples) where volcanic activity can be monitored in real time. In this case the coverage consisted of Navy hydrophone arrays (listening for quakes rather than subs), surface ships, moored sensors, and instruments placed on the very summit of the caldera in anticipation of an eruption. The 1998 event is chronicled in a variety of ways in a series of articles in the December 1 and 15 issues of Geophysical Research Letters. For example, C.G. Fox reports (via on-the-spot seafloor measurements) a 3-meter drop in the caldera floor; Baker et al. provide the first in-situ observation of the water temperature change above an erupting rift zone (constituting the "largest vent field heat flux yet measured"); Embley et al estimate that up to 76 million cubic meters of lava were produced, modest by land volcano standards, but the largest outpouring in 20 years of monitoring along the Juan de Fuca Ridge. (Robert Embley, Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, embley@pmel.noaa.gov, 541-867-0275.)