Based in Asia. Filming the World.

75,000 years ago the eruption of a supervolcano was the biggest vocanic eruption of the last two million years and one of the biggest physical traumas that planet earth has ever suffered.

The caldera of this supervolcano, Danau Toba or Lake Toba is it is called, is an extraordinary 100 kms long, 30 kms wide and 505 metres deep and it now forms the water filled basin in the centre of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

When it erupted, some 2800 km3 of sediment and ash was hurtled into the earth's atmosphere, encircling the planet and creating such a blockage to sunlight that the temperature on the ground plummeted. This in turn had a lethal effect on all animal and plant life and the catastrophic affect it had on humanity was to subsequently alter the genetic inheiritance of all human survivors.

The only comparable supervolcano to Danau Toba anywhere else in the world is in Yellowstone National Park and vulcanologists say that this sleeping giant is long overdue for one of its regular eruptions.

A documentary camera team from Singapore and Jakarta travelled to Sumatra and spent a week filming the geological and topographical features of the Toba caldera for the definitive BBC Horizon programme on the subject called Supervolcanoes.