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.