Qualla: Soufrière Hills

Soufrière Hills: Introduction

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Hawks, CC BY 3.0. Plymouth is still there, under the ash. The clock tower, the government buildings, the houses where families ate breakfast and argued about politics and hung laundry in the Caribbean sun -- all of it entombed beneath roughly 40 feet of volcanic debris, earning the town its haunting nickname: "the new Pompeii." The Soufrière Hills volcano, which looms over the southern half of the tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat, had been dormant for so long that nobody alive remembered it being anything other than a green, forested mountain. The last significant eruption had been around 1550 AD. Then, on 18 July 1995, the first phreatic explosions cracked through the summit, and everything Montserratians understood about their island began to collapse along with the growing lava dome.

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Image: Patrick Hawks | CC BY 3.0

Soufrière Hills: The Slow Catastrophe

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Patrick Hawks, CC BY 3.0. The cruelest thing about the Soufrière Hills eruption was its pace. This was not a single cataclysmic blast like Mount St. Helens. It was a grinding, episodic disaster that dragged on for years, punctuated by moments of terror. The first phreatic explosions in July 1995 led to an...

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Image: Patrick Hawks | CC BY 3.0

Soufrière Hills: The Day the Dome Collapsed

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. On 25 June 1997, the volcano killed nineteen people. A massive dome collapse sent pyroclastic flows racing down the mountain's flanks at speeds that left no time for escape. The W. H. Bramble Airport, Montserrat's only airfield, sat directly in the path of the main flow and was c...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Soufrière Hills: A Volcano That Keeps Reshaping Itself

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photograph: T. Gilligan, Public domain. The Soufrière Hills is an andesitic stratovolcano, a type known for lava dome formation and explosive collapse rather than the flowing rivers of lava that volcanoes like Kilauea produce. Its summit changes shape. Chances Peak was once the highest point on Montserrat, but the volc...

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Image: Photograph: T. Gilligan | Public domain

Soufrière Hills: Ghosts and Music

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Twofortnights, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before the eruption, Montserrat had an improbable cultural legacy. In 1979, Beatles producer George Martin built AIR Studios in the hills near Salem, and for a decade some of the world's biggest musicians recorded there -- Jimmy Buffett wrote his song "Volcano" after relaxing at ...

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Image: Twofortnights | CC BY-SA 3.0