Alan Linde, IT Systems Engineer Michael Acierno, and Electronic Design Engineer Brian Schleigh have been participating in field work at the Montserrat Volcano Observatory since mid-April. The photo on the right is of one of the group's stations, located near Trant's Bay. The station used to be within 30 yards of the ocean until a major pyroclastic flow, originating at Montserrat's Soufrière Hills Volcano, moved the land edge out another 200 yards and about 700 yards farther to the south in February. The hot ash came very close to the site but fortunately did not damage it.

The group, along with colaborators from five other institutions, have been studying the Soufrière Hills Volcano since 2002 as part of the Caribbean Andestitic Lava Island Precision Seismo-geodetic Observatory (CALIPSO) project, which introduced the first and only instrumented borehole strainmeter network at any andesitic volcano. The ultimate goal of the project is to investigate the dynamics of the entire magmatic system of the Soufrière Hills Volcano and to enhance understanding of andesitic magma dynamics more generally.