re: About Krakatoa: first person reports

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Wasnt it the loudest sound ever recorded up until the A-Bomb?

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I think it was much louder than the A-Bomb. The sound of Krakatoa was heard hundreds if not thousands of miles away.


Edit: yep. The A-bomb is the loudest man made sound, but Krakatoa is the loudest sound in recorded history

LINK

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The combination of the powerful explosions that ripped through the volcano and the subsequent collapse of the rock into an undersea magma chamber resulted in the loudest sound ever recorded.

It clocked in at 310 decibels.

The loudest sound ever created by humans, not by natural causes, was said to be the atomic bomb blasts over Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Those clocked in at around 250 decibels. NASA’s highest recorded decibel reading was 204 and that was the first stage of the Saturn V rocket.

310 decibels is loud enough to kill you. Ear drums rupture between 150 and 160 decibels. That means Krakatoa was exponentially higher on the decibel scale as a sound high enough to cause your ear drums to literally explode. A sound exponentially louder than anything likely to have been heard in thousands, perhaps millions of years.

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And all the way in Australia, some 2,800 miles distant, an ocean away, it was reported as far off rifle or cannon fire.

That is roughly the same distance between Los Angeles and New York City. Imagine being on the street in Manhattan and hearing something that was occurring in downtown Los Angeles. It’s almost unbelievable. Almost.

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This sound was so loud that the shock wave was recorded moving around the globe. It circled the globe not once, not twice, but three times before petering out.

The force of the blast was so great, it was reported that an island less than ten miles from the volcano was devoid of all life. Three thousand natives were reportedly killed, most likely due to the force of the shock wave alone.

The sound alone killed them.

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The shock wave was detected traveling around the earth something like 5 times.

ETA

The pressure wave from the third and most violent explosion was recorded on barographs around the world.Several barographs recorded the wave seven times over the course of five days: four times with the wave travelling away from the volcano to its antipodal point, and three times travelling back to the volcano