The loudest noise ever recorded was so loud that it could be heard thousands of miles away, but it was significantly worse for those who were closer, blowing out the eardrums of people who were 40-miles away from the source.
Consider something so loud that it makes a jet engine or a My Bloody Valentine gig seem like a gentle tickling of your eardrums.
The sound we’re talking about was so intense that it was 10 to the power of 21 times louder than a jackhammer.
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The noise was so hefty that it even warped the very nature of the sound waves it created, meaning that it became a pressurised wall of air instead of a traditional sound.
Basically, anything you’ve heard in the world of drum and bass or heavy metal is just a whisper compared to this.
What’s more, it was a completely natural sound, and theoretically it could happen again.
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Our story begins back in 1883, when the uninhabited volcanic island of Krakatoa, somewhere between the Indonesian islands of Java and Sumatra, suddenly burst into life after centuries dormant.
On August 27 that year, the island was blown completely to smithereens, releasing a force equivalent to that of a 200-megatonne bomb, and the loudest sound that has ever been recorded in the process.
At a 100 miles away at a gasworks in Jakarta, the sound was measured at 172 decibels.
To throw that into context, the human ear would be in considerable pain at 130 decibels, with each 10 decibels added to that feeling like a doubling of the sound, according to Nautilus.
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The sound was so loud that sailors on a ship some 40 miles from the explosion had their eardrums burst, with the captain believing that the end of days was upon them.
The captain’s log of the Norham Castle read: “So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered,
“My last thoughts are with my dear wife.
“I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”
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The shockwave grew quieter as it travelled around the globe, but could still be heard like a ‘distant gunshot’ around 3,000 miles away.
An estimate suggests that the sound would have been 310 decibels in total, which is enough to change the nature of the wave itself.
Around 194db, the energy within a sound wave begins to distort and create a vacuum between waves, meaning that the sound no longer moves through the air, but brings air with it.
That means a shock wave, or the 'great air wave' as it was known, which is felt physically and can be seriously dangerous.
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The wave from Krakatoa travelled several times around the world in either direction before it dissipated, occasionally creating other pressure points as it collided with itself.
Since then, the loudest sound recorded is thought to have been the 2022 volcanic eruption in Tonga, from which a sonic boom could be heard in Alaska around 3,850 miles away.
That explosion created tsunamis and pressure waves that reached speeds of 700 miles per hour, and up to an altitude of 280 miles, which is above the orbit of the International Space Station.
Science is scary, and the natural world is even more terrifying.
Topics: World News, Science, Weird
Tom Wood