Lake Toba

The numbers

• 1,140km²Area, measured442 mi² · Natural Earth outline
• 1,150km²Area, publishedWikidata · agrees within 2%
• 529mGreatest depthaverage about 210 m
• 240km³VolumeWikidata
• 905mAbove sea levelSurface, Wikidata

The area is measured from the outline drawn above, on the WGS84 ellipsoid; the published figure is shown beside it, and a water body is kept only if the two are within 10%.

What the numbers say about Lake Toba

• The Caspian Sea (called a sea or a lake, depending on the definition), the largest of the 104 lakes ranked on sizeversus, is 332× the size of Lake Toba; Lake Toba ranks 84th.
• Lake Toba sits between Lake Saint Clair (1,150 km²) and Island Lake (1,130 km²) in the ranking.
• Counted as a country, Lake Toba would be larger than 35 of the 212 countries listed on sizeversus and would rank 178th by area, between the Comoros (1,670 km²) and São Tomé and Príncipe (1,040 km²).
• It is larger than 1 of the 51 US states and districts (the biggest of them is Washington, D.C., 162 km²) and smaller than 50.
• It is smaller than every one of the 31 provinces and regions of China.
• The closest US state is Rhode Island (2,830 km²): Lake Toba is 40% of the size of Rhode Island.
• Wikidata records a greatest depth of 529 m; with its volume that gives an average depth of about 210 m.
• Wikidata records a volume of 240 km³. Poured over São Tomé and Príncipe (1,040 km²), that water would stand 231 m deep.
• Its surface lies about 905 m above sea level (Wikidata).
• Lake Toba lies at 3°N, close to the equator, where a standard web map (Web Mercator) is nearly true to size: it inflates area by only about 1.0×.
• Laid out flat, Lake Toba stretches about 61 km north to south and 71 km east to west.
• Wikidata’s published figure of 1,150 km² agrees with our measured 1,140 km², to within 2%.

About the same size as

On the shore

• Indonesia

Natural Earth’s outlines of Indonesia contain or lie within 4 km of the outline of Lake Toba. That is what its geometry says, and it is not a statement about who owns the water or where any border runs in it.

Names

• Lake Tobathe name in this page’s titlesource: Wikidata’s English label
• Tobaalso calledsource: Natural Earth
• Danau Tobaalso calledsource: Natural Earth