Underwater Noise Destructive to Environment

What does 280dB mean?

That is 120 dB x 10^16; or in other terms: 10,000,000,000,000,000 times louder than a starting jet air plane!
This incomprehensible amount of noise is produced under water where oil and gas companies explore new resource fields.
While ships' sonar devices have been linked to whales beaching themselves, this situation is untenable. Hope to illustrate it with a graph:

Can't stand that noise!

For the tech heads, some detailed info on decibels can be found on MISCELLANY and the UNSW website.