Deep open crater at summit of La Soufrière

There is now a deep open crater at the summit of La Soufriere.

This observation was made by scientists during an observation flight on Monday, April 26.

Professor Robertson, speaking on NBC on Tuesday, gave an overview of what the crater looked like on Monday.

When persons ventured up Soufrière before this year’s explosive eruptions, they would would have seen a big open area inside the crater, with a dome in the middle, and another smaller dome next to the big dome, that had been building since December.

Now, “…you will see no dome, what you will see is an open crater that goes down quite a ways down.”

“…If you go up on the Windward side, you would look across and where you saw the dome growing before in 2020/2021, …

you can think of that as the epicentre,” Robertson revealed.

“…But you have a huge crater that goes out for a couple hundred meters in terms of width,” and, “it’s deeper now than the pre-exisitng crater floor.”

He also observed a lot of loose material on the crater, and two small pits, which were steaming.

Along the rims of one of the pits, is loose material or “tephra”, and the ash has built up so high on the side of the Larikai valley, that it reached the crater rim.

“…So in fact now you could walk all the way from the Windward side, all the way around and you could essentially walk into the crater without actually going down a rope, because the material has built up so much,” the volcanologist explained.

Additionally, “There’s a part of it where you have a large mass of rock that sticks up – we call it a spine – it looks like a black pillar that’s up more towards the North Western side…”