St. Vincent & The Grenadines: La Soufriere Volcano Remains Calm

According to the Montserrat Volcano Observatory (MVO), the geological activity of the Soufriere volcano, which is located on the island of St. Vincent in the southern part of the Lesser Antilles, has been steadily decreasing since its last explosion on April 22.

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Photographs taken by MVO scientist Adam Stinton confirm that La Soufriere has not spewed lava or formed a new dome in recent weeks.

"That's good news," said Stinton, although he recalled that the dome formed in the last eruption has a diameter of about 800 meters and a depth of 200 meters.

“It is a pretty sizable crater and it is clearly excavated down below the surface, down below the level of the floor of the old summit crater and it is still possible to see the remnants of the 1979 lava dome in the north eastern and eastern sections of the new crater” he said, as reported by outlet The Gleaner.

Although this volcanic system seems inactive at the moment, the population should not lower their guard and rush to return to the areas of greatest risk.

"You always have to be cautious because... the risk is low but not insignificant," warned Lloyd Lynch, an instrumentation engineer at the Seismic Research Center of the University of the West Indies (UWI).

After years of being calm, La Soufriere began to exhibit some significant volcanic activity in December 2020. Subsequently, it erupted explosively on April 9 and then developed 30 discrete eruptions through April 22.

At the most dramatic moment of the eruptive process, some 22,000 people left their homes and moved into 50 emergency shelters across the country.