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.
NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data obtained from the Goddard Land Processes data archives (LAADS).
