Let's say you live in Boston, and your friend tells you he heard a sound all the way from New York.
You'd think he was crazy, right?
Now, imagine that instead, he claimed the sound came all the way from Dublin, Ireland.
Impossible? Let's go back in time to August 27th, 1883.
The people of Java and Sumatra were going about their daily lives that particular morning,
when the island of Krakatoa let out a sound louder than any we've heard since.
The Great Volcano of Krakatoa had just erupted with a force so powerful, it blasted the island apart.
The plume of smoke the blowed from the mountain reached a height of 17 miles into the atmosphere,
according to a geologist who witnessed the event
The gas, rock, and ash thrust from the volcano at more than twice the speed of sound--
over 1,600 miles per hour.
The blast created a tsunami with towering waves over 100 feet high--
which obliterated 165 coastal villages (MLG air horn plays).
The death toll from this tsunami is estimated to have been anywhere from 36,000 to 120,000 people.
So, just how loud was this earth-shattering explosion?
Let's start with a report from the British ship Norham Castle, which was just 40 miles from Krakatoa when it blew.
The captain wrote in his log: "So violent are the explosions that the eardrums 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."
Moving further from ground zero, a barometer at the Batavia Gasworks, 100 miles from Krakatoa, registered the spike in pressure at
2.5 inches of mercury. That means that a 100 miles from the source, the sound registered
at an ear-shattering 172 decibels (dB).
To put that in perspective, a jackhammer operator is subjected to 100 decibels.
The human threshold for pain is 130 decibels.
Standing right behind a jet engine is an incredible 150 decibels.
Every 10 decibel increase is generally felt to sound twice as loud.
172 decibels is pushing the limit of what can actually be discerned as sound.
At ground zero, the noise from the blast was well over 200 decibels,
producing a shockwave equivalent to a 200 megaton nuclear blast.
That's about 13,000 times the yield of the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima,
or 4 times the yield of the Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear device ever detonated.
This sound was heard as far away as Australia, over 2,100 miles away.
Past the 3,000 mile mark, the sound was too quiet for human ears, but was detected by barometers all over the globe.
Almost 7 hours after the blast, a spike of air pressure was detected in Calcutta,
where Mother Theresa would eventually do her work.
An hour later, the pulse had reached Mauritius in the west and Sydney in the east.
At 12 hours after the eruption, the pulse was detected in St. Petersburg, followed by Rome, Paris, Berlin, and Munich.
At 18 hours, New York, Washington, DC, and Toronto, and it didn't stop there.
These sound waves were detected for the next 5 days, recurring like clockwork every 34 hours,
roughly the amount of time it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.
By the time it was all over, the pressure waves from the mighty volcano had circled the globe
three to four times in every direction.
At each pass, on tidal stations around the world, people recorded a rise in ocean waves concurrent with the pulse,
something that had never been seen before.
All told, the sound from Krakatoa was heard by people in over 50 geographical locations,
spanning an area of 1/13th of the entire globe.
The blast that destroyed the island is the loudest sound, heard over the largest distance, ever recorded.
Considering the effects of such a monumental explosion, from tsunamis, to shockwaves, surpassing
the biggest nuclear weapons, to the cloud of ash that lowered the earth's temperature for several years,
let's hope the Krakatoa holds on to its title.
If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to keep up to date with the latest content.
Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next video.
Subtitles by SwiftenCrafter.