The cruelest thing about the Soufrière Hills eruption was its pace. This was not a single cataclysmic blast like Mount St. Helens. It was a grinding, episodic disaster that dragged on for years, punctuated by moments of terror. The first phreatic explosions in July 1995 led to an initial evacuation of Plymouth that lasted just two weeks. People went home. Then the lava dome began growing inside English's Crater, a sector-collapse scar first identified in the 1930s. The dome grew, and the evacuations resumed. Residents were allowed back to Plymouth on 1 January 1996. By April, pyroclastic flows and mudflows had become routine enough to trigger a permanent evacuation of the capital and the entire southern part of the island. For those who lived through it, the eruption was a years-long negotiation with uncertainty -- a volcano that offered just enough quiet between episodes to make people wonder if it was finally done, before proving that it was not.

On 25 June 1997, the volcano killed nineteen people. A massive dome collapse sent pyroclastic flows racing down the mountain's flanks at speeds that left no time for escape. The W. H. Bramble Airport, Montserrat's only airfield, sat directly in the path of the main flow and was completely destroyed. The island's tourist industry, already weakened, collapsed alongside it. The eruption that summer buried most of Plymouth under pyroclastic deposits and ash, transforming a functioning Caribbean capital into a grey moonscape. The human toll extended far beyond the nineteen dead. About two-thirds of Montserrat's population -- roughly 8,000 people -- eventually left the island. Many evacuated to Antigua and Barbuda, which warned it could not absorb many more refugees. Others scattered to Britain, the Virgin Islands, wherever they had family or could find footing. They left behind homes, businesses, churches, and the graveyards where their ancestors were buried.

The Soufrière Hills is an andesitic stratovolcano, a type known for lava dome formation and explosive collapse rather than the flowing rivers of lava that volcanoes like Kilauea produce. Its summit changes shape. Chances Peak was once the highest point on Montserrat, but the volcanic domes that grew and collapsed during the eruption cycle alternately exceeded and fell below its elevation. Two interconnected magma chambers feed the system -- one six kilometers below the surface, the other at twelve kilometers -- and a 2008 study published in Science demonstrated that the behavior of the deeper chamber influences eruption patterns at the surface. The volcano continued to erupt periodically through 2010, with a notable vulcanian explosion on 5 February of that year propelling pyroclastic flows down multiple sides of the mountain simultaneously. The most recent eruption was in 2013. The Montserrat Volcano Observatory, now one of the most sophisticated monitoring stations in the world, watches the dome constantly.

Before the eruption, Montserrat had an improbable cultural legacy. In 1979, Beatles producer George Martin built AIR Studios in the hills near Salem, and for a decade some of the world's biggest musicians recorded there -- Jimmy Buffett wrote his song "Volcano" after relaxing at a hot spring at the mountain's base, never imagining the song would become grimly prophetic. Hurricane Hugo damaged the studio in 1989. The eruption finished it. The ruins sit in the exclusion zone now, alongside the abandoned settlements that read like a roll call of loss: Plymouth, Kinsale, Long Ground, Galway's Estate, Harris, Bethel, Streatham. Some, like Salem and Woodlands, have been resettled. Most have not. From the observation point on Jack Boy Hill, visitors can look south across the grey landscape and see boulders still occasionally tumbling down the slopes. The island is getting larger -- the eruption's deposits have extended the southern coastline. But for the Montserratians who lost everything, the new land came at a price no one would have chosen to pay.