One of the reasons that idyllic refuge is so quiet, however, is its location just next to a military training area. Several years ago, the Campaign to Protect Rural England declared a spot in Northumberland the most tranquil place in the country. Given the lack of truly silent places in nature, identifying the quietest place on Earth really boils down to how stringent you are about how long silence should last. “All over the Earth, not a day goes by when you don’t hear something.” “There are no places on Earth that I’ve been that haven’t been affected by human sound,” agrees Bernie Krause, an expert in bioacoustics and one of the founders of the field of soundscape ecology. Hempton is not alone in this pronouncement. A map of the established flight paths over the US, for example, “looks like a plate of spaghetti,” he says. Unfortunately, Hempton says that there is absolutely no place on Earth that is completely free from human sound all of the time. “Even if you are far from a road, you are not far from the roads in the sky,” he says. Even deep in the Amazon rainforest, 1,900 km (1,200 miles) from the nearest city, Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist and founder of the non–profit One Square Inch, recorded sounds from one or two aircraft per hour. The North Pole is out too, as planes regularly traverse that route on trips between North America and Europe. While no commercial flights travel across Antarctica, they do cruise over wildernesses such as northern Canada, Siberia or the Sahara. There is no altitude that a commercial jet can fly at which it is not audible on the ground, and the sound of any given aircraft can be heard, on average, between three to eight minutes as it passes overhead. The rumblings of the largest aircraft can, on a clear day, travel up to 160km (100 miles). Other apparently remote regions of Earth might prove no better. And in the summer, research planes and tourism boats are prevalent, and resident scientists power their camps with whirring diesel generators, the rumble of which can be heard for 20 miles or more around. In the winter, you wouldn’t want to go for a stroll. It no doubt has silent corners – but the seasons do make things tricky. Google Earth further reveals timber operations, mining, agriculture, roads and nautical shipping routes – all, presumably, rife with noise.įollowing this logic, Antarctica immediately comes to mind as a promising candidate. Satellite images can be used to exclude all areas with artificial light. On land, scratching noisy places off the list of potentials comes easily. In water, sound travels more than four times faster than in air, and reaches further. That’s not to mention the underwater rumblings of ships, drilling and explosions that permeate the worlds’ oceans. Similarly, life underwater would be full of hardships – and in any case, you couldn’t escape man-made sounds like scuba regulators or submarine engines because you’d need them to stay alive. So while deep underground might be an option, it wouldn’t be very hospitable. So if you were seeking to escape this background buzz, where would you start? First let’s assume that you’d want somewhere reasonably pleasant to visit. Humanity’s noises are always with us in one form or another. What can you hear? Even in what seems like silence: you may soon notice the hum of your computer, the ticking of a clock, the electric burr of a refrigerator or an air conditioner, or the faint hum of a car passing by. Sit still for a moment, and prick up your ears. Foy, for one, did find his ultimate silent spot in the end, but it wasn’t quite the peaceful refuge he anticipated – in fact, he discovered there that there’s one human noise none of us can ever escape. Yet it turns out that finding those unsullied locations is more difficult than it might seem. He joins many others, ranging from health professionals to ecologists to hobbyists, who have attempted to seek out the quietest corners in the world. “I thought, ‘If this is the craziness of noise, what is the opposite? What is absolute silence, and does it exist?’”įoy took it upon himself to seek out the world’s quietest place, detailed in his recent book, Zero Decibels. It was then that his obsession to find the quietest place on Earth began. “I started wondering why the hell I was putting up with this,” he says. He hunched over and stuck his fingers in his ears, desperately trying to block out the cacophony. “I kind of went momentarily crazy,” he says. It was on one such platform that George Foy, a journalist and New York University creative writing professor, suddenly found himself losing it one day, when four trains pulled in at once. Down there, sound levels regularly exceed 100 decibels – enough to damage a person’s hearing over time. A special kind of noisiness accosts passengers waiting for New York City subways.
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