Mystery of the Megavolcano
Mystery of the Megavolcano
Lake Toba is a lake and supervolcano, 100 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide, and 505 metres (1,666 ft) at its deepest point. Located in the middle of the northern part of the Indonesian island of Sumatra with a surface elevation of about 900 metres (2,953 ft). It is the largest volcanic lake in the world and the site of a supervolcanic eruption that occurred about 74,000 years ago, a massive climate-changing event. The eruption is believed to have had a Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) intensity of 8. This eruption is believed to have been the largest anywhere on Earth in the last 25 million years. According to the Toba catastrophe theory to which some anthropologists and archeologists subscribe, it had global consequences, killing most humans then alive and creating a population bottleneck in Central Eastern Africa and India that affected the genetic inheritance of all humans today.
The theory was proposed in 1998 by Stanley H. Ambrose of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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