Bracing for the big one on Montserrat.

songs of the 1980s came to life here, in a pale beige ranch-style house perched on a bluff. Elton John, Paul McCartney, and Stevie Wonder, among others, made the pilgrimage to this recording studio on the “Emerald Isle” of the Caribbean. Perhaps they drew inspiration from the shimmering turquoise waters, or maybe their muse was the mountain looming in the southeast: the Soufrière Hills volcano. The vista is as entrancing as ever, long after the music died. AIR Studios, part of the vast Montserrat estate of Beatles producer George Martin, sits abandoned on a swath of land evacuated by authorities last October. The only sounds on a sunny afternoon last month were the sloshing of a cement mixer and the banter of volcanologist Barry Voight and his colleagues as they yanked yard after yard of plastic piping, conduit for the fresh cement, from a borehole near the studio. If a siren had blared, Voight’s team members would have dropped what they were doing and hauled out of the exclusion zone as fast as they could have: The lava dome of Soufrière Hills is bigger than ever since the volcano roared back to life in the mid-1990s, and it could collapse at any time, in any direction. Today, the volcano is calm, a taupe ash cloud drifting lazily out to sea. The researchers have just about finished installing two devices—a meter-long steel-sheathed seismometer that resembles an artillery rocket and a smaller, more cylindrical tiltmeter— near the bottom of the borehole, one of four drilled around the volcano. The sensors sit atop a strainmeter so sensitive that it can detect motions in the rock of the dimensions of an atom. The recordings from these instruments may not rival the sounds that once filled AIR Studios, but they will be music to the ears of scientists: They are expected to be the most precise readings yet of the mountain’s inner stirrings. “We’re hoping to get a feel for what’s happening deep in the system,” says Voight, who is from Pennsylvania State University, University Park. “This volcano is a unique natural laboratory.” The mountain’s often enigmatic convulsions have been a boon to modelers, who are starting to put together a coherent picture of the relation between magma movements and the varying seismic signals they trigger. “The models are starting to give us some power to explain the phenomena we’ve seen in this eruption”—insights that can be N E W S