Retiring recently after more than 40 years in public service and after the pain of his People’s National Movement (PNM) party losing the April 28th general elections, former prime minister Keith Rowley is returning to his original profession – the study of volcanoes.

Speaking at a weekend forum in his native Tobago, the smaller sister island of Trinidad, Rowley says he now has the time to go back to volcano research as was the case when he was director of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Centre decades ago.

He insists, however, that he is not getting back into volcanology for work purposes but mostly to keep academically active now that he has free time.

“Now that I have retired from politics, the very first thing I want to do is to get back into volcanoes, so as a result of that, I’ve agreed next month I’m going to Montserrat, where we celebrate a conference of 30 years of the volcano that destroyed Montserrat,” he said.

“I’m diving straight back into that, not as a job, but as intellectual stimulation. I had the opportunity on more than one occasion to stand between populations that were threatened and volcanoes that are virtually a super whatever and … I felt that was the biggest sacrifice that I could have made,” he added.

His first venture will include a visit next month to Montserrat’s Eastern Caribbean island, which in mid-1995 was devastated by a massive volcanic eruption that had buried most of the south of the 39-square-mile island near Antigua. The result was that nearly half of the 11,000 population had moved to nearby islands or left for England, which still owns the island.

A new capital in the northwest had to be constructed as Plymouth remains buried under tons of ash and lava. A second major eruption in 1997 killed 19 people.

Rowley has a doctorate in geology, specializing in geochemistry, and a master’s in volcanic stratigraphy. He recalled that in his time, there were few, if any, regional specialists in this area.