Noivern, one of the cooler generation 6 pokémon can pulverize a boulder with it’s ultrasonic powers, apparently!
The first thing that strikes me about this entry is that it emits the waves from its ears. This is strange, because our ears perceive sounds, not emit them. Emitting sound from your ears would be like shooting lasers from your eyes. What this tells me is that Noivern’s ears are not only hearing devices, but are also some kind of vocal organ, which makes sounds like our larynx or a bird’s syrinx.
Having two (or possibly three with its mouth?) sound-emitters would definitely be helpful in echolocation (see Zubat). More sound sources allow Noivern to more accurately determine where, how far, and how fast other things around it are.
But that’s just being nitpicky, let’s get on to the pulverization! As you probably know, sound is a wave, meaning it has certain properites like wavelength, frequency, energy, and so on. Ultra-sonic just means “beyond hearing”. Ultraviolet or infrared light would be considered ultra-visual light (outside our range of seeing), as an example. Ultra-sonic typically refers to sounds with frequencies larger than 20,000 Hz, which humans can’t hear, but dogs and bats can.
So how can sound be used as a weapon? Think of a stereotypical opera singer, who’s voice shatters a wine glass in her hand:
This happens because every object has a resonant frequency, or a frequency which it likes to vibrate at. If you flick a wine glass and it rings, you can hear its resonant frequency. If you give that frequency back to it loudly enough, it will vibrate out of control and shatter.
Our eyeballs have a resonant frequency of about 19 Hz! Your eyeballs wouldn’t shatter, but you would have vision problems such as seeing spots if this frequency was pointed at you, as discovered in the 1950s with on of the first sonic weapons.
Sonic weapons are exactly what they sound like (pun intended): weapons that shoot sound! Many of them can injure, incapacitate, or even kill people. For example, this is an LRAD (Long Range Acoustical Device), which produces extremely powerful sound waves like Noivern:
It produces over 120 decibels of sound, which is extremely loud, like a rocket launch. This will hurt you physically, and if you set it to the right frequency you wouldn’t even be able to hear it coming.
So that’s how Noivern works! Extremely powerful sound waves, the right resonant frequency, the rock shatters like a wine glass. All with his sound-emitting ears!
Noivern’s ears contain vocal organs which emit extremely powerful sound waves at ultra-sonic frequencies. At the right frequencies, it can shatter boulders.
PiraticOctopus 