 Approximately 30 million years ago, the Farallon Plate, being driven outwards by the Pacific-Farallon ridge, was pushed underneath the North American Plate, splitting what remained into the Juan de Fuca Plate to the North and the Cocos Plate and Nazca Plate to the South.Axial Seamount is a submarine volcano located on the ridge at a depth of 1400m below sea level, rising 700m above the average ridge height.Axial is the most active volcano in the northeastern Pacific basin, and an underwater cabled observatory has been installed there as a part of the National Science Foundation's Ocean Observatories Initiative, making it one of the best studied volcanoes along mid-ocean ridges globally.