Lake Toba
Interesting facts
- Samosir, at about 630 square kilometres, is the world's largest island within an island, sitting in a lake on the island of Sumatra.
- Seismic studies suggest the volcano's eruptible magma, stored in stacked sills nicknamed magma pancakes, could total about 50,000 cubic kilometres.
- The caldera is the youngest of four overlapping calderas at Toba, the earliest of which formed around 1.2 million years ago.
- Ash patterns suggest the great eruption happened during the northern summer, since only the summer monsoon could carry Toba ash into the South China Sea.
- Pyroclastic flows from the eruption devastated at least 20,000 square kilometres, and parts of Malaysia were buried under around 9 metres of ash.
- Toba ash has been found in sediments of Lake Malawi in East Africa, thousands of kilometres from the volcano.
- The lake is nutrient-poor, so it has few native fish; only two are endemic or nearly so, including the threatened Batak fish.
- A small cone at Tandukbenua on the caldera rim is so sparsely vegetated that it may have erupted only a few hundred years ago.
- Lake Toba is believed to be the largest resurgent caldera on Earth, its floor still pushed upward by magma below.
- The lake appeared on Indonesia's 1,000-rupiah banknote issued in 1992.
Why it is worth it
Lake Toba fills the caldera of a supervolcano in the highlands of North Sumatra. It is the largest lake in Indonesia and the largest volcanic lake on Earth: about 100 km long and 30 km wide, up to 505 m deep, with its surface at around 900 m above sea level. In the middle rises Samosir Island, which is in fact the resurgent floor of the volcano, pushed up at least 450 m by magma since the great eruption. The whole caldera is a UNESCO Global Geopark, recognised in 2020.
That eruption, about 74,000 years ago, was the largest explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years. It threw out at least 2,800 cubic kilometres of material, left ash hundreds of metres thick near the vent, and dropped a layer of ash across South Asia, up to 6 m deep at one site in central India. Scientists have long debated whether the volcanic winter that followed nearly wiped out early humans; more recent studies have found little evidence of a lasting population crash, but the eruption remains one of the landmark events of the Ice Age.
The people of the lake are mostly Toba Batak, and their culture gives the landscape its character. Traditional Batak houses, with saddle-shaped roofs sweeping up at both ends like the hull of a boat and richly painted gables, still stand in villages such as Ambarita on Samosir, and Batak canoes once carried carved prows. A local folk tale explains the lake's origin through a fisherman who caught a golden fish, with Samosir as the fish's son. On the northern side of the lake, near the village of Tongging, is the Sipiso-piso waterfall.
Getting there
Pangururan, on Samosir, is about 22 km away; Parapat on the eastern shore is the usual transit point for the lake and the island. Kualanamu International Airport (KNO) near Medan is about 107 km away in a straight line; Medan is about 173 km from Parapat by road. Sisingamangaraja XII International Airport, near the lake's southern end, is about 76 km from Parapat.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Lake Toba is a large natural lake in North Sumatra and Indonesia. The lake is the massive caldera of the Toba supervolcano. The lake is located in the middle of the northern part of the island of Sumatra, with a surface elevation of about 900 metres (2,953 ft), and stretches from 2.88°N 98.52°E to 2.35°N 99.1°E. The lake is about 100 kilometres long, 30 kilometres (19 mi) wide, and up to 505 metres (1,657 ft) deep. It is the largest lake in Indonesia and the largest volcanic lake in the world. Toba Caldera is one of twenty geoparks in Indonesia, and was recognised in July 2020 as one of the UNESCO Global Geoparks.
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2.67000, 98.88750per Wikidata