With remote sensing and an international army of geologists, SEA-CALIPSO takes the measure of an angry mountain.
— By Charles Fergus
Barry Voight first went to Montserrat, an island in the British West Indies, in March 1996. The veteran volcanologist had been invited by the island’s government and by staff at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory (MVO), who were monitoring a lava dome that had been growing for four months atop the previously dormant Soufriere Hills volcano. The steep, cone-shaped volcano occupied the southern end of the 40-square-mile island, towering 3,000 feet above the capital city of Plymouth, population 7,000.
The government officials and MVO scientists wanted Voight’s opinion on the potential danger from a crater-wall collapse on the volcano’s western flank, which directly faced Plymouth. More than twenty-five years earlier, Voight had accurately predicted that a massive avalanche on Mt. St. Helens, in the Cascade Range in Washington, could trigger a destructive lateral blast, which took place on May 18, 1980. Since then, as a member of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Volcano Hazards Response Team, Voight frequently had inspected ready-to-blow volcanoes around the world. At times, he and his fellow volcanologists gave advice leading to evacuations that saved hundreds, if not thousands, of lives.
