The shock wave from Friday’s meteor explosion over Russia was massive enough to have been detected halfway across the planet.

Sensors in Greenland and Africa were among the distant locations that picked up the low-frequency sound waves from the blast. The sensors are part of a network designed to pick up shockwaves from a nuclear blast.

The waves are similar to sound waves whales use for communication and navigation so the human ear cannot pick them up.

The explosion has been determined by NASA scientists to have been 300 kilotons of energy, 20 to 25 times stronger than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. However, the blast is less than the meteor explosion in 1908 over Siberia that released 10 to 15 megatons of energy.

This lead one scientist to make what seems like an understatement regarding the strength of the event.

“This was a moderate explosion,” Paul Chodas of the Jet Propulsion Labratory in Pasadena, California told Fox news.