How many decibels will kill you

Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Physical Science. Can a sound wave kill you? Worst case scenario, your sister's trumpet playing will just make you feel like your head's about to explode.

It would take exposure to a far larger instrument for far longer to actually get that explosion. How Hearing Works. Sources Anthony, Sebastian. July 1, Cite This! Try Our Crossword Puzzle! And then there are the more constant sounds. The wind blows. Waves on the ocean slap at each other. The inaudible signals travel hundreds of miles, sometimes thousands.

In particular, he told me that two sounds interfere with the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty network, because they are so constant, so pervasive and so loud. The other is just the sound of the wind — which can reach infrasound decibel levels equivalent to those of a motorcycle. Even with that protection, extremely loud infrasounds can still have an impact on our bodies. Humans exposed to infrasounds above decibels experience changes in their blood pressure and respiratory rates.

They get dizzy and have trouble maintaining their balance. In , an Air Force experiment found that humans exposed to infrasound in the range of decibels for 90 seconds began to feel their chests moving without their control.

At a high enough decibel, the atmospheric pressure changes of infrasound can inflate and deflate lungs, effectively serving as a means of artificial respiration. That would be the Chelyabinsk meteor , which exploded in the sky over southern Russia, near the border between Europe and Asia, on Feb. Test-Ban Treaty sensors picked up the infrasound more than 9, miles from the source and the sound waves circled the globe. The nearest sensor was miles away, Garces told me, and even at that distance the infrasound decibel level reached This does, however, differ a lot from person to person.

YouTube has some fun hertz scales that can give you an approximation of the extent of your hearing range. Maggie Koerth is a senior science writer for FiveThirtyEight.

All Videos YouTube. Footnotes This does, however, differ a lot from person to person. So, there you have it: Sound can kill you, but not in the standing-in-front-of-a-giant-speaker-stack-at-a-gig way that you were probably thinking. Home Electronics Can a loud enough sound kill you? This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.

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