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.

Comments

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/1138/

Just another heat map of the population. Nothing to see here, folks.

Re:Orders of Magnitude

[sribe]

60db is only 1/3 of an order of magnitude above 20db. 200db is one order of magnitude above 20db and is like a canon going off and no city is that loud consistently. Two orders of magnitude above 20db would damage hearing at 2,000db.

You fail. db is a logarithmic scale. 10db is a factor of 10. 60db is 4 orders of magnitude from 20db.

Re:From an Audio Engineer

[acoustix]

Get yourself a pair of Bose QC25.

Did you just tell an audio engineer to buy Bose products? Why don't you kick his dog and call his mother a whore while you're at it.