Soufrière Saint Vincent

On 27 December 2020, the highest point on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent – named La Soufrière – started to rumble. La Soufrière is a stratovolcano that rises 4,049 feet above sea level. Since 1718, it has erupted violently just five times, the last coming in 1979.

St. Vincent is one island that makes up the nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which is part of the Lesser Antilles, a string of islands of the eastern Caribbean Sea.

In dormant periods, La Soufrière can appear to be a peaceful mountain, with a crater lake and hiking trails. But in December and January, the crag started to effusively erupt, which means lava steadily, but non-explosively, emerged from the volcano. Two months of slow buildup created a lava dome that reached a size of 300 feet wide and 3,000 feet long. Government officials put the area into high-alert mode.

The sobriquet “Soufrière” means “sulfur outlet” in French, a proper name for a volcano. Four of La Soufrière’s explosive eruptions of the historical era occurred in 1718, 1812, 1902, and 1979.

The event on 2 May 1902 killed 1,680 residents of St. Vincent. Coincidentally, the eruption happened just hours before a famous explosion on Mount Pelée, which resulted in the deaths of 29,000 human beings on the island of Martinique. The disaster on St. Vincent that year wiped out the last large enclave of Island Caribs, an indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles.

English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner produced a gnarly depiction of the 1812 eruption that hangs in the Victoria Gallery & Museum in Liverpool.

Back in the present day, by February the mountain was spewing gas and steam plumes. By late March, the lava dome had doubled its width and had reached skyward nearly 350 feet. A lava dome of this size means serious business.

Seismic and lava activity continued to increase through early April, which forced the government to officially declare a red alert to residents of the island on 8 April. It was clear that La Soufrière was going to blow its stack.

Take a peek at what the volcano looked like on 8 April:

The next morning, at 8:41 AM, La Soufrière detonated. An ash plume rose over 32,000 feet into the sky. The following image of its volcanic plume was taken via satellite!

Yes, it’s that big!

In addition to the vertical plume, the volcano produced pyroclastic flows. These currents are the most dangerous outputs of volcanoes. The eruption produces tephra, a mixture of matter from the explosion, and hot gases, which often “flow” down the flanks of the mountain instead of rising into the air. These flows move much more quickly than lava and usually leave life no chance of getting out of the way.

Richard Robertson, a scientist with the University of West Indies’ seismic research group, said the pyroclastic flows would have ravaged anything in their paths: “Anything that was there, man, animal, anything…they are gone.”

The photos and video footage of the blast and its aftermath of ash-rain are incredible. The following images come from the Associated Press (click to see them, as we cannot host the photos to avoid copyright issues).

The island was blanketed with ash.

Power and water services died in vast swaths of the region. A second explosion transpired on April 11, just as residents thought the worst might be behind them.

The particulate in the air was so massive that Barbados, 120 miles to the east, started to see ashfall.

Check out this video for some imagery of the ash on St. Vincent:

Monday, April 12, brought another explosion. This third major incident was the strongest yet.

The eruption of La Soufrière came in at a 4 on the Volcanic Explosivity Index. That measurement garners a description of “Cataclysmic” and requires a plume over 10 kilometers and a definite stratospheric injection. For reference, the Mt. St. Helens explosion of 1980 was a 5, as was the famous Vesuvius disaster in the year 79.

Volcanologists and seismologists continue to monitor La Soufrière. They warn that, despite the severity we’ve already witnessed, the worst could be yet to come.

Some 16,000 people were displaced from their homes around the volcano and will probably remain so for months to come. There is some good news, however. Shockingly, thanks to robust warning systems and heeded calls for evacuations, to date, not a single person has died from the eruption!