North Island’s Lake Taupo lies in a caldera created following a huge volcanic eruption approximately twenty-six thousand five hundred years ago.

According to geological records, the volcano has erupted twenty eight times in the last twenty-seven thousand years.

The largest eruption, known as the Oruanui eruption, which occurred around 26,500 Years Before Present in Late Pleistocene, ejected an estimated eleven hundred and seventy cubic kilometers of material and caused several hundred square kilometers of surrounding land to collapse and form the caldera.

The caldera later filled with water, eventually overflowing to cause a huge outwash flood.

Several later eruptions occurred over the millennia before the major eruption in 180 CE, the most recent.

Known as the Hatepe eruption, it is believed to have ejected one hundred cubic kilometers of material, of which thirty cubic kilometers was ejected in the space of a few minutes.

This is one of the most violent eruptions in the last five thousand years (alongside the Tianchi eruption of Baekdu at around 1000 and the 1815 eruption of Tambora), with a Volcanic Explosivity Index rating of 7.

The eruption column is twice as high as the eruption column from Mount St. Helens in 1980, and the ash turns the sky red over Rome and China.