Tongoa and Epi islands in present Vanuatu once formed part of a larger island called Kuwae.

Local folklore tells of a cataclysmic eruption that destroyed this island, leaving the two smaller islands and an oval-shaped twelve by six kilometer caldera in between (but the story tells of an eruption south of Tongoa).

Collapse associated with caldera formation may have been as much as eleven hundred meters.

Around thirty-two to thirty-nine cubic kilometers of magma is erupted, making the Kuwae eruption being one of the largest in the last ten thousand years.

In Antarctica and Greenland ice cores, a major eruption or series of eruptions is revealed as a spike in sulfate concentration showing that the release in form of particles was higher than any other eruption in the past seven hundred years.

Also, the ice core analyses are able to pinpoint the event to late 1452 or early 1453.

This volume of expelled matter is more than six times larger than that of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption and would have caused severe cooling of the entire planet the following three years.