On August 27, 1883, a volcanic island tore itself apart with a bang so violent it ruptured sailors' eardrums 40 miles away and was heard 3,000 miles distant — the farthest a sound has ever traveled. The pressure wave then circled the entire planet, over and over, for days. This is the story of a sound at the physical limit of what air can carry.
A visual reconstruction of the eruption's scale — roughly 200 megatons, four times the largest nuclear bomb ever built. Start here to feel the size of it.
The full timeline: four explosions in a morning, tsunamis up to 30 meters, more than 36,000 dead, and a sky that stayed red across the globe for months.
Geodiode breaks down the acoustics — why ~172 decibels at the source approaches the theoretical ceiling for sound in Earth's atmosphere.
Nautilus on the moment sound stops being sound and becomes a shockwave — and how a barograph in a British gasworks quietly recorded the wave passing seven times.
How weather instruments on every continent captured the same invisible pulse for days — the first time a single event was measured circling the whole planet.
A documentary on the human catastrophe — the pyroclastic surges that raced across open sea and the coastal towns that simply ceased to exist.
A scholarly look at the aftermath: blood-red sunsets that inspired painters and poets, and the possibility that Krakatoa's ash is the sky behind Munch's 'The Scream.'