Interesting Facts – You may think your upstairs neighbor’s 1 a.m. vacuuming session is noisy, but it’s nothing compared to what nature (and the occasional human-made marvel) can throw at us. Sounds can injure your ear immediately once they reach 120 decibels, the typical volume of a police siren if you’re right beside it, but the loudest sound ever recorded was more than 300, loud enough to increase atmospheric pressure to a point that causes damage to far more than just human ears.
Decibels are logarithmic measures of sound intensity — so keep in mind that the scale gets exponentially bigger as the number goes up. Doubling the volume on your stereo does not even come close to doubling the decibel output. So when an undersea creature produces a noise around 30 decibels higher than the loudest rocket launched by NASA (true story), you know you have a seriously big sound on your hands.
Which natural phenomenon produced the loudest known sound? What widely misunderstood sea giant generates an ear-shattering kind of Morse code? Just how loud is an asteroid impact? These six giant sounds will put that garage band next door in some serious context.
Krakatoa Eruption
The loudest sound ever recorded was an 1883 volcanic eruption on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa, clocking in at an estimated 310 decibels. Not that anybody who heard the explosion at full blast lived to tell the tale; it was estimated to have a force equivalent to 10,000 times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, and destroyed most of the island while shooting unstable clouds of hot gas to the surrounding area.
However, plenty of witnesses farther away did survive — and there were a lot of them. Some 100 miles away in North Jakarta, the noise still reached around 172 decibels. Violent tsunamis shook the Indian Ocean, and the waves even rocked boats in South Africa. Atmospheric pressure spikes reached as far as England, and a cloud of ash bathed an area of 300,000 square miles around the volcano in darkness. The global temperature even dropped, and didn’t return to normal until five years later.
SF Source Interesting Facts Jan 2023