Important Takeaways:

• Mount Spurr, which sits about 75 miles west of Anchorage, has seen “volcanic unrest” for the last 10 months, including an increasing number of earthquakes, according to a Feb. 6 statement from the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
• The unrest suggests “that an eruption is possible,” officials said.
• Since April, the number of earthquakes under the volcano has increased from 30 a week on average to 125 a week, officials said. The observatory “has located over 2,700 earthquakes during the unrest episode thus far,” according to officials, who said the largest of them was a magnitude 2.9 quake on Jan. 2.
• “Based on all available monitoring data,” the observatory views the chance of no eruption versus one similar to those in 1953 and 1992 as equal, officials said.
• Officials said they’d “expect to see additional seismic activity, gas emissions, and surface heating, as well as changes to surface deformation prior to an eruption, if one were to occur. Such stronger unrest may provide days to a few weeks of additional warning, but that is not certain.”

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