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New Map Shows USA's Quietest Places
sciencehabit writes Based on 1.5 million hours of acoustical monitoring from places as remote as Dinosaur National Monument in Utah and as urban as New York City, scientists have created a map of noise levels across the country on an average summer day. After feeding acoustic data into a computer algorithm, the researchers modeled sound levels across the country including variables such as air and street traffic. Deep blue regions, such as Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming and the Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, have background noise levels lower than 20 decibels — a silence likely as deep as before European colonization, researchers say. That's orders of magnitude quieter than most cities, where noise levels average 50-60 decibels. The National Park Service is using the map to identify places where human-made noise is affecting wildlife.
The summary is pretty much the entire contents of the linked article, except for a relatively low-resolution map of the US with colors indicating what's loud and quiet. You guessed it - cities are loud, wilderness is quiet.
In 1980 I moved from inner suburban Melbourne to a sawmill town which is now a ghost town in the middle of a huge national park that straddles the NSW/VIC border. The town had about a dozen houses, a sawmill and a dairy farm, there were no other humans for at least 50km in every direction. The first few nights I found it difficult to sleep, bellowing cows, a chorus of frogs, barking of wild dogs, squealing of feral pigs, owls hooting, etc, all combined to make a huge racket all night long. Midday was the quietest, the mill was silent due to lunch and the birds were quiet because of the midday heat. The sheer volume of the morning chorus of birds while walking to work is something I will never forget. Since the 80's I've spent a lot of time in the bush, camping with my kids, etc. Never have I come across another place with such prolific (and loud) wildlife. I feel privileged to have lived and worked in such a place and even though it meant losing my house and job at the time, I'm glad it is now a national park.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale. 30 dB is an order of magnitude louder than 20 dB (10 times the power).
Well given I live in the woods I will tell you that they are not quiet!
Come sundown the cicadas go mental and their noise can make talking to someone else hard. Then there are all the birds! Do you know how loud a cockatoo is!!! Let alone a kookaburra! Then at night you get the demonic noises of fighting possums, the sounds of male koalas and all the frogs. Damn you frogs!
And then if you really really really want to hear a noise that will chill you to your bones - https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - that is the sound of the Curlew. When you hear that for the first time in the middle of the night........
It might be a different noise to cars, or sirens, or some morons crap music. But woods, quiet they are not!