SUPERVOLCANOES: blasts from the past
ake Toba, on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia, is an idyllic place. Cross to the island of Samosir and you can sit in front of a rented A-frame traditional ‘jabu’ house and look out at the 100km by 30km lake. You would never guess that under the placid surface lies an underground supervolcano which caused a global cooling event around 75,000 years ago. Over a period of just two to three weeks, the supervolcano sent of material into the air – twice the mass of Mount Everest. The quantity of ash alone, an estimated 800km, would have been sufficient to bury everything in Australia under a suffocating layer 10cm deep.
