Many people think that Taal is "the smallest volcano in the world." From its most popular viewpoint in Tagaytay, visitors see a beautiful scene of a serene small volcano on a pretty lake. This video explains why Taal Volcano is often confused to be small, that what most people view is not all there is about the volcano. Its recent display of a highly explosive eruption, on Jan 12, 2020, certainly did not come from a small volcano.
Taal Volcano, located in Batangas province, in the island of Luzon, in the Philippines, is a volcano within a much larger volcano. Its lake, called Taal Lake, sits within a massive prehistoric supervolcano, that had a catastrophic eruption thousands of years ago, and collapsed into a volcanic caldera called the Taal Caldera. The remnants of a supervolcano, its main crater on volcano island is its opening. There are 47 craters and 4 maars, which are flat-floored craters. The caldera and whole lake is the volcano, and that little volcano often first viewed from Tagaytay is actually a cinder cone, an extinct conical crater. The massive extinct volcano that once stood there was thousands of times larger than Krakatua and towered 18,000 feet high into the sky. It was considered to be one of the largest volcanoes in the world...