The Soufriere Hills Volcano on the Caribbean island Montserrat released a faint plume on November 9, 2007. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image the same day. In this picture, the plume appears as a very faint haze over the ocean, fanning out toward the northwest. A trail of clouds moves in the same direction, casting shadows on the plume below. The clouds could result in part from the water vapor in the plume.
Soufriere Hills is a stratovolcano composed of alternating layers of hardened lava, solidified ash, and rocks ejected by previous eruptions. After a seventeenth-century eruption, the volcano remained quiet until 1995. A severe eruption that year led to the evacuation of the southern half of Montserrat.
References & Resources
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data obtained from the Goddard Land Processes data archives (LAADS).
