gameable event.
Portent? God’s wrath? Atlantis and the trumpet heralding its refugee crisis?
What if, in fact, there is a great scream all through nature? What are the PCs going to do, knowing only that some calamity has happened, but not knowing what or in which direction?
Originally shared by Lea Kissner
Wait But Why has, in their typical way, flooded us with interesting information, this time on sound. Read the whole thing, but the Krakatoa part is especially mind-blowing. Literally.
The 1883 Krakatoa volcano eruption: I’m overwhelmed by the amount of things I need to tell you about the Krakatoa. Let’s do bullets.
Krakatoa is an island in Indonesia, and the eruption happened on August 27, 1883.
The eruption completely annihilated the island, sent an enormous amount of debris 17 miles (27 km) high into the sky at half a mile per second.
It also caused one of the most deadly and far-reaching tsunamis in history. In total, the eruption killed 36,000 people.
But the most amazing thing about the eruption was its sound. It made arguably the loudest sound on Earth in modern history.
It was so loud that the shockwave extended far enough to rupture the eardrums of sailors 40 miles away.
100 miles away, the sound was still 172 dB, enough to permanently destroy someone’s ears or even kill them. Wherever you are, think of a place that’s about 100 miles (161 km) away. Now imagine something happening there that causes a sound so loud where you are that if you were screaming at the top of your lungs directly into someone’s ear when the sound hit, they wouldn’t be able to hear that you were doing it. For comparison, the Saturn V launch sound was at 170 dB 100meters away. Krakatoa was higher than that 100 miles away.
The sound cracked a foot-thick concrete wall 300 miles (483 km) away.
The sound was heard all the way in Australia (where it sounded like a distant canon ball being fired) and even as far away as Rodrigues Island, 3,000 miles away. 3,000 miles away. I’m currently in New York. Imagine if something happened in California or in Europe that I could hear in New York. I can’t even.
After the sound eventually got far enough away that humans couldn’t hear it anymore, barometers all over the world were going nuts for the next few days, as the sound waves circled the Earth 3.5 times.
Finally, you know the famous painting The Scream? Well you know how the sky’s all red for some reason? The sky is red because the painter, Edvard Munch, was inspired to paint it after seeing the Krakatoa-caused red skies all over the Western Hemisphere in the year after the eruption.
It was a big eruption.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/03/sound.html//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js
Tattered Remains of Tartary 
when the first baby laughed that laugh broke into the fairies that now gyre and gambol in the “wabe.”
this is the sound of the applause that necessarily keeps them moving.
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I’m still re-reading Declare and thinking about the Heaviside Layer, used by radio transmissions and appropriated by T S Eliot for his place-cats-go-when-they-die. Apparently the ionosphere is filled with cat ghosts. Does their mewling protect us, like the ozone layer, from extraterrestrial incursions? Or are we kept deaf to our true potential by the sublunary chorus?
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…also if we think of rising through the Hermetic spheres as gaining access to the god-realm, then why did we (in Hermetic lore) elect to be so far from the administrator layer?
Are we buried under 9 levels of firewalls? If so, what made that a good idea?
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#bbcnephilim
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