How to Use megaton in a Sentence

megaton

noun
  • Of course, picking HL2 as this year’s winner leaves a megaton of game in the runner-up slot: World of Warcraft.
    Sam MacHkovech, Ars Technica, 20 Aug. 2019
  • Then the Mustang and Camaro got redesigned, losing their megaton-blast V-8s in the process.
    Ezra Dyer, Popular Mechanics, 3 Aug. 2016
  • The Soviet Union tested its first megaton-range weapon 62 years ago.
    Alex Wellerstein, The Atlantic, 5 Sep. 2017
  • That brought the total for June, July, and the first part of August to more than 180 megatons, roughly three and a half times more than the country of Sweden emits in a year.
    Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • Equipped with a two-megaton warhead, it could be used to take out entire ports or U.S. carrier strike groups.
    Alex Hollings, Popular Mechanics, 5 Apr. 2023
  • The second measurement to get accustomed to is the megaton.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 25 July 2023
  • The Obama administration was planning to retire this weapon, which is the last of the megaton-class bombs.
    Michael R. Gordon, WSJ, 24 Dec. 2020
  • Reports from Russia indicate the bomb could be as large as 100 megatons.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 16 Jan. 2018
  • Over the first 18 days of August alone, Arctic wildfires emitted 42 megatons of carbon dioxide.
    Kendra Pierre-Louis, New York Times, 29 Aug. 2019
  • The band ended Hiroshima-style, with a ten-megaton rage detonation just before a Paris gig in 2009.
    Kyle Smith, National Review, 11 Sep. 2019
  • The use of megaton bombs to kill individuals meant, of course, that many hundreds of thousands of other people would also be killed.
    Jessica T. Mathews, The New York Review of Books, 20 Aug. 2020
  • By her calculations, even an area the size of London could grow enough seaweed to sequester ten megatons of carbon dioxide per year.
    Saima May Sidik, Smithsonian Magazine, 22 Jan. 2024
  • The sources of this electrical power released over 85 megatons of carbon dioxide.
    Erik Klemetti, Discover Magazine, 30 Oct. 2023
  • The four-megaton weapon did not detonate only because its fourth and last safety switch held in place, the other three 50-cent pieces of equipment having armed themselves.
    Michael Auslin, The Atlantic, 5 Nov. 2017
  • By comparison, the Tunguska event -- which flattened a huge forested area in Russia's Siberia -- is thought to have only been about 10 megatons of force.
    Mike Wehner, Fox News, 28 June 2017
  • Tsar Bomba,’’ with a force estimated at about 50 megatons.
    BostonGlobe.com, 30 Oct. 2019
  • Most hydrogen bombs are rated in megatons, the equivalent of 1,000 kilotons.
    Popular Mechanics Editors, Popular Mechanics, 7 Feb. 2018
  • Every year, krill remove as much as 23 megatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to new research published by the World Wildlife Fund.
    Joshua Goodman, Fortune, 13 Oct. 2023
  • Or from slitting their throats, sticking his pickax in their sternum, or attaching them to a plummeting megaton bomb.
    David Fear, Rolling Stone, 4 May 2023
  • The larger circle showed the range of a 9 megaton two-stage thermonuclear bomb, and the smaller circle showed the range of a 15 kiloton bomb comparable in strength to the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — not the other way around.
    New York Times, 2 Sep. 2017
  • The explosion blew the silo blast doors off and sent chunks of debris flying everywhere, including the nine-megaton nuclear warhead that sat atop the missile.
    Vince Guerrieri, Popular Mechanics, 18 Sep. 2020
  • Early data enabled Boslough and Crawford to estimate the size of the fragments: the biggest was nearly 2 kilometers across, and the power of the blast reached around 1 million megatons, dozens of times the power of the nuclear arsenal on Earth.
    Richard Rapaport, WIRED, 1 Oct. 1995
  • The blast, which was later attributed to a comet or asteroid fragment, is generally estimated to have been about 10 megatons.
    Fox News, 23 June 2017
  • While there is no indication that North Korea could increase this number, even 0.1 percent is effective when power is measured in megatons.
    David Hambling, Popular Mechanics, 28 Sep. 2017
  • The strongest flares release energy equivalent to millions of 100-megaton hydrogen bombs exploding at the same time, or about one tenth of the total energy emitted by the entire Sun in one second.
    Tom Yulsman, Discover Magazine, 31 Mar. 2023
  • In the last three years alone, the area affected by forest fires has tripled, spewing megatons of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere, according to official Russian estimates.
    Frederik Pleitgen, CNN, 6 Aug. 2019
  • Even Trump, master media manipulator, doesn’t understand the megaton load of this subject.
    Chris Stirewalt, Fox News, 18 July 2018
  • Designed to vaporize coastal cities and military facilities with up to a 100 megaton warhead, an incoming Poseidon torpedo would have to be stopped at all costs.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 22 Oct. 2018
  • One of the five new nuclear weapons systems Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled last week was a terrible new doomsday torpedo that can cross entire oceans to deliver a multi-megaton punch.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 7 Mar. 2018
  • Scientists have forecasted the potential impact, estimating that the rock would strike with an amazing 750 megatons of energy.
    Mike Wehner, Fox News, 28 June 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'megaton.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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