7 Loudest Sounds Recorded By Mankind
From the time humans developed the technology to record the intensity of sound , there was a curiosity among people, what is the loudest sound we have ever heard?
From a doorbell to a thunder, sound affects us in many different ways.
The unit for measuring the intensity of sound is Decibel (dB) given by Alexander Graham Bell, yes! the same person who invented the telephone.
Decibels can’t even precisely gauge these sound intensities; analysts rather measure them by the measure of energy they discharge — as they accomplish for bombs or different explosives.
Here I will tell you the loudest sounds recorded by mankind till date, some of them will blow your mind for sure.
But first, here is the list of some day to day sounds you hear and their approximate intensity for your reference.
Whispering (30 dB) — Soft
Conversation (60 dB) — Moderate
Vacuum Cleaner (75 dB) — Loud
Passing Truck (85 dB) — Very Loud
Chainsaw (110 dB) — Extremely Loud
Thunderbolt (120 dB) — Too loud and SCARY
Jet Engine (140 dB) — Painful
Rocket Launch ( 180 dB) — Unbearable
Now that you have seen the scale, I am assuming you now have a pretty good idea about the various intensity of day to day sounds.
HOWLER MONKEYS
These large apes are usually native of South and Central American rainforests.
These Howler monkeys have an enlarged hyoid bone in their throat that has evolved with time to construct a kind of resonating chamber, by the virtue of which they produce loud howls and probably the loudest noise in the animal kingdom.
The sound intensity has been recorded to be 140 dB and could be heard from a distance of 5 kilometers. This has also landed the monkey in the Guinness Book of World Records.
LEAF
If you ever saw a space rocket launch, you surely experienced loud noise even you were several kilometers away from the source.
So you can imagine what the satellites and tech equipment, loaded on the rockets, have to go through, even though they don’t have ears.
Large European Acoustic Facility (LEAF) is the testing facility of European Space Agency that tests the sound integrity of delicate instruments of the satellite.
It has heavily soundproof chambers with thick concrete walls and has horns fitted inside those walls which are operated automatically by pressurized nitrogen gas.
Those horns can replicate the sound intensity of multiple jet aircraft and can reach up to 158 decibels.
CHELYABINSK METEOR
Who can forget the footage of a bright sun-like object tearing the sky, shot by multiple dashcams in February 2013 in Russia.
The explosion caused by this meteor was equivalent to the force of 500 kilotons of TNT which shattered glasses of many buildings causing debris all over the town.
The calculated intensity of the sound was 180 dB from about 5 km away.
Even the infrasound from this explosion was detected by the nuclear weapons testing station in Antarctica, 15000 km away.
TUNGUSKA METEOR
It was the morning of June 1908 when the largest meteor collision and one of the loudest noise produced by it, was recorded in the history of mankind.
The meteor didn’t actually collide the earth, rather it exploded 10–15 km above the ground, called an ‘airburst’, in eastern Siberia Taiga.
Eyewitnesses told they saw a glowing fireball like sun shooting across the sky and sounded like a bomb explosion which is estimated to be around 197 dB.
The strength of the blast was equivalent to 700 atomic bombs.
Millions of trees uprooted due to the shockwave.
Shockwave produced was so powerful that it flattened 80 million trees over an area of 2150 km of forest cover and shattered windows several miles away and also thumped individuals off their feet.
The blast in the sky resembled nothing at any point seen previously.
SATURN V ROCKET
Saturn V was the super-heavy launch vehicle that was part of NASA’s Apollo program.
The three-stage liquid propellent system could produce 33,000 kN of thrust with 204 dB of sound intensity which was the second loudest sound produced by mankind.
It also owes the record of having the heaviest and largest payload capacity, about 140,000 kg, to low earth orbit.
It was launched 13 times, including the historic Apollo 11 mission.
TSAR BOMBA
In October 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the most powerful bomb ever created by mankind, over the arctic circle. Its name was RDS-220 or more popularly Tsar Bomba.
It was a hydrogen bomb whose power was equivalent to 50 million tons of TNT or roughly you can say 1000 times more powerful than atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even more scary fact is that Russians wanted to make a 100 megaton version but settled with the one having half the power- SERIOUSLY!
Its explosion was so powerful that people saw its flash from more than 900 km away and fell its heat even 250 km away from ground zero.
It is estimated that it produced 224 dB sound at the source which is the loudest noise ever generated by humans.
KRAKATOA VOLCANIC ERUPTION
Krakatoa is a volcanic island situated between the Java Sumatra islands in Indonesia.
On 27 August 1883, the Krakatoa volcano erupted with a series of explosions killing thousands of people.
The strength of the explosion was estimated equivalent to the explosion of 200 megatons of TNT or 13,000 atomic bombs.
The intensity of sound was estimated at approximately 310 dB near the source and about 220 dB about 10 kilometers away.
You can just gauge its power by the fact that the sound of the explosion was heard even 4800 kilometers across the Indian Ocean, where people reported it as a series of loud distant gunfire.
This was the deadliest explosion and the loudest sound ever recorded in the history of mankind.
Which is the loudest sound you ever heard? Do share your experience in the comments.
