Lakes often form in depressions caused by glacial erosion (Great Lakes of USA) or by down-dropping of large blocks of the crust (the lakes of East Africa), but such gentle processes didn't cause Lake Toba in Sumatra.
In 1949 the Dutch geologist van Bemmelen reported that Lake Toba was surrounded by a vast layer of ignimbrite rocks. Toba was apparently a huge volcano! Later researchers found rhyolite ash similar to that in the ignimbrite around Toba in Malaysia and even 3000 km away in India. And oceanographers discovered a vast dusting of Toba ash on the floor of the eastern Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal. These scientists quickly realized that the Toba eruption, dated at 75,000 years ago, was the most recent truely large eruption on Earth. Bill Rose and Craig Chesner of Michigan Technological University combined all the information on the extent of the Toba volcanic material to deduce that the total amount of erupted material was about 2,800 km3. About 800 km3 was ignimbrite that travelled swiftly over the ground away from the volcano destroying everything in its path, and the remaining 2,000 km3 fell as ash, with the wind blowing most of it to the west. Such a huge eruption probably lasted nearly two weeks. Very few plants, animals or humans around this part of Indonesia would have survived.
http://vulcano.und.edu/vwdocs/vw_hyperexchange/toba.html
Times has passed in hundreds or event thousand of years, Earth slowly evolutes to be a wise place for a new life of a living mankind, Nature found its way, disaster have changes into a harmony, world has change into a new. The legend of Pusut Buhit (Centrum of Earth), is a tales of a first mankind a live after the giant collapse, which indigenous Batak believed as a genesis of a new world and Lake Toba is a place where nature provide all necessities for human to start a new life, they also believe the first mankind from Pusut Buhit created to protect the earth and guard the sense of fairness. Forest, water and soil, need to be wisely exploit, fairness and balance should be the spirit between human and nature relationship. because disaster is not the end, it actually the beginning of life, and it also works the other way around, there will be a new man and a new life, there will be a new world and it should be a better world.
In the future Pusut Buhit will no longer be a myth of a new world, because history will tell that the changing is divine, like a sun sine on every morning glory, because we will start it now from Pusut Buhit, Samosir Island of North Sumatra
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