It could be argued that the scale of the universe is such that our minds will never be able to comprehend it. In fact, it seems very likely that even things here on earth are far beyond what our minds could imagine at the best of times. That’s one of the reasons people will refer to flooding by saying it was like 100 Olympic sized pools, or a distance something travelled was six football fields. They’re all just ways to make something hard to comprehend a little more understandable. And when it comes to the incredible power and energy nature can wield, it’s pretty mind blowing.
10. Mount St. Helens Released 24 Megatons of Thermal Energy
North America is subject to frequent hurricanes and tornadoes as well as more than its fair share of earthquakes. And though they are rare, there are a number of volcanoes present as well that also erupt from time to time, such as Washington state’s Mount St. Helens. When it erupted back in 1980, it proved its remarkable power in terrifying ways.
Starting in March of that year, a series of earthquakes were recorded in the area and the actual volcano itself began to bulge outward by 450 feet. When it finally erupted on May 18, it released 24 megatons of thermal energy, which means 24 million tons of TNT. It released 520 million tons of ash and destroyed enough trees to have built 300,000 houses just with the initial lateral blast.
9. Turning 1 kg of Hydrogen to Helium Releases as Much Energy as Burning 20,000 Tons of Coal
The sun is forever engaged in a fusion reaction that turns hydrogen into helium, producing light and heat and keeping us all alive. Fusion is a hell of a way to produce power and we’re all hoping one day someone masters it down here on Earth because it would make life a lot easier. But until that time we have to make do with things like nuclear fission, solar power and good ol’ fossil fuel burning.
The difference between how fusion and burning coal works is so preposterous that it seems made up when you try to match it up on the same scale. By that we mean the difference in power generated when the sun turns one kilogram of hydrogen into helium versus how much coal we need to burn down here on earth to get the same amount of energy produced.
The reaction of one kilogram of hydrogen becoming helium releases 630 trillion joules, or what you’d get from burning 20,000 tons of coal.
Over the course of its life, the sun will use 1.95 x 1029 kg of hydrogen. In a single second, the sun generates 3.9 x 1026 watts of power. To put that in perspective, in one second, the sun produces more power than the entire world would use in a few hundred thousand years.
8. A Hurricane’s Energy is 200 times the Electricity Generating Capacity of the Whole World
Hurricanes are arguably the most terrifying force of nature any of us will ever see. The destructive potential of a hurricane is hard to believe and we’ve all seen the evidence of the destruction they can produce. But how much power is behind that terrifying force? The scale is massive and really puts things in perspective for you.
From the moment a hurricane is born through its cycle of destruction until its ultimate demise, it will release as much energy as 10,000 nuclear weapons. Put another way, all of that energy, and we’re including cloud and rain formation, is about 200 times the amount of electricity generated across the entire planet. That’s just one hurricane. We average about six per year, with several other storms not quite reaching hurricane status.
7. Krakatoa Exploded with the Force of 10,000 Atomic Bombs
In 1883, the volcano on the island of Krakatoa exploded and produced the loudest sound in the history of the world. It’s estimated to have hit 310 decibels, so loud that it managed to circle the planet 4 times. It was 172 decibels, 100 miles away. A jet engine will hit you with 150 decibels if you’re standing next to it.
When it erupted, it went off with the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s 10,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It’s believed upwards of 36,000 people were killed.
6. 1 kg of Uranium 235 Produces 3 Million Times the Heat of 1 kg of Coal
For a long time now, people have debated the merits of nuclear power versus something like traditional coal burning. Nuclear comes with dangers such as the potential for meltdowns and the problem of nuclear waste. Coal burning causes pollution and, as we’re about to see, is terribly inefficient by comparison.
If you had one kilogram of uranium-235, you could generate 24,000,000 kWh of heat. By comparison, you’ll make 8 kWh from the same weight of coal. So uranium has around three million times the energy-producing capability of an equal amount of coal. One single uranium fuel pellet is equal to one ton of coal.
5. Tsunamis Can Produce Enough Power to Run Major Cities or Even Countries for Days
In the past few decades, there have been a couple of massively destructive tsunamis. In 2011, a tsunami hit Japan wielding three petajoules of energy. That was enough to power New York City for an entire week. But even that pales in comparison to one just seven years earlier.
In 2004, an undersea earthquake triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean the day after Christmas. The power of the tsunami has been estimated to be equal to 0.8 gigatons of TNT. In more practical terms, that’s as much energy as the entire United States of America will use in 11 days and works out to 3.35 exajoules. What the heck is an exajoule? That’s one quintillion joules.
One calorie of food produces 4,184 joules of energy. A Big Mac has 550 calories. That means a Big Mac is equivalent to 2,301,200 joules. Divided by the exajoules in the tsunami and it produced the energy equivalent of just under 1.46 trillion of them. That’s a lot of Big Macs.
4. Climate Change is Adding Energy Equivalent to Exploding Thousands of Nuclear Weapons Per Day
These days everyone is aware of climate change and most people who still want to argue about it choose the man vs nature approach. Which is to say even the critics have agreed that earth is getting warmer, they just don’t agree on why. But if we all accept the earth is warming up, just how much energy is the earth absorbing to do such a thing?
Heat is energy, so the energy required to warm the entire planet is no small scale achievement. Scientists studying global temperature trends tried to put it in perspective in a fairly dramatic way.
Between 2005 and 2019, scientists compared the earth’s energy imbalance. This compares the amount of energy we absorb versus how much we can radiate. The imbalance doubled in that time period and the amount of extra energy the earth is absorbing works out to four Hiroshima explosions occurring every single second. This is actually slightly better than the 2012 estimate by NASA climate scientists that said it was equivalent to 400,000 Hiroshima’s per day, but not by much.
3. A 9.0 Earthquake Releases 90 Times the Power Produced by the US
Like any natural disaster, an earthquake packs a serious punch. The seismic power of an earthquake is typically related to use by use of the Richter scale, but saying an earthquake measures a four on that scale doesn’t really put much into perspective. Luckily, there are some equivalences we can make.
If an earthquake did register a 4.0 on the Richter scale, you’d consider it fairly mild, more or less. That said, it releases energy equivalent to 1 kiloton of TNT. Sounds like a lot, right? It works out to about 1162 mWh or the energy. If the average US household uses 10.715 kWh in a year, then a 4.0 earthquake could power 108 American homes for a year. But that’s just a moderate quake. Let’s go up the scale to a serious quake.
It’s rare that an earthquake measures 9.0 on the scale. That’s a serious quake and they only happen every few years, if not decades. Based on data from the US Geological Survey, they’ll release energy on par with exploding 32,000 megatons of TNT. That works out to 1,338,880,000,000 gigajoules. Convert that to MwH and you get 371,911,111,111.11. The US generates 4,095,487,406 MwH of electricity. So that 9.0 earthquake generated 90 times the power of the entire US annual power production capacity.
2. The Meteor That Killed the Dinosaurs Was More Powerful Than The World’s Nuclear Arsenal
Everyday we go about our business with the knowledge, somewhere in the back of our heads, that a meteor could hit the Earth and wipe us all out in a matter of moments. It’s not likely or anything, but it happened before, so it could certainly happen again one day. And that means a meteor must be a pretty powerful thing when it touches down. We can look at a recent one to figure out just how powerful they can be.
In 2013, a meteor lit up the Russian skies over the city of Chelyabinsk. The 11,000 ton rock flew through the air at 42,000 miles per hour, creating a shockwave that laid waste to 4,000 buildings. It released energy equivalent to 30 times the bomb that exploded at Hiroshima. Powerful stuff. But, as you may have noticed, the world didn’t end.
If we go back in time, the most famous meteor in history would be the one commonly attributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs. That one was clearly more powerful than Chelyabinsk, and the scale of that power was remarkable.
Research has estimated the power of that particular blast was equal to 10 billion of the bombs dropped during the Second World War. Enough to scorch life thousands of miles away and cover the earth in a cloud that wiped out 75% of all life.
1. A Supernova Produces More Energy Than Anything You Could Imagine
Let’s leave the earth for a minute because, as powerful as nature is here, the universe at large shames our tiny blue dot. Let’s go into the vastness of the great beyond towards a star as it lashes out in its death throes. A supernova.
As far as we know, this is the biggest explosion that can exist. And they can get big. So big that our efforts to try to make it sound understandable are still, frankly, ridiculous. But at least it will offer some kind of perspective.
The energy released during a supernova can be around 1044 joules. That one event will therefore release as much energy as the exploding star released during the previous 10 billion years of its existence. Imagine our sun burning as hot and bright as it does for 10 billion years. We already covered that every second it produces all the energy the earth could use in hundreds of thousands of years. All of that, for 10 billion years of time, released all over again during the supernova.
That’s still very insane and very hard to grasp, so we can break it down further. One specific supernova was observed by scientists in 2015. Called ASSASN-15lh, the dying star was 580 billion times brighter than our own sun. It produced a blast that was a billion trillion times more powerful than the explosion of the tsar bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever tested. It was 30 times brighter than the entire Milky Way galaxy, itself home to 100 thousand million stars.