This is addressed in the article to which the posted one links: http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times http://nautil.us/bl

This is addressed in the article to which the posted one links: http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-earth-four-times http://nautil.us/blog/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-circled-the-... > But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.