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Land Art Park Significantly Reduces Jet Engine Noise Near Airport

Posted by Soulskill on from the art-that-serves-a-purpose dept.

ClockEndGooner writes: A study conducted by the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research found that low frequency and long wavelength jet engine droning noise was significantly reduced in the fall after farmers plowed their fields near Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport. The remaining furrows "had multiple ridges to absorb the sound waves, deflected the sound and muted the noise." This led to the development of the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a buffer park featuring "land art" that has significantly reduced aircraft noise without requiring cuts in the number of allowed flights in and out of the airport. The land art park has also provided neighbors with additional recreational paths and sports fields in the same space.

3 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. sourceforge significantly reduces crapware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    just kidding! For those that don't know (it's news everywhere except slashdot), source forge has been busted for putting up crapware installers of software hosted elsewhere (such as gimp-win). In many cases, it's hosted elsewhere because people were trying to avoid sourceforge's shitty business practices (like, you know, crapware installers).

  2. Re:What a shocker by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    You must not have even read the summary, that's impressive even for Slashdot! the geometry of the landscape is what caused the reduction in noise, not the fields on top of it. Actually, the clear cutting is what resulted in the better sound quality, due to the ridges formed in the ground after the fields were harvested. also, for future reference, while trees and shrubs help, they offer far less acoustical blockage than most people expect. the more you know.

  3. Re:What a shocker by mc6809e · · Score: 4, Informative

    Who would have thought having trees, shrubs and other natural barriers between an airport and the people would reduce noise levels?

    It's as if clear cutting was found not to work.

    Who thinks that? People that have never studied noise abatement and think their cleverness is enough to allow them to intuit the science.

    Trees and shrubs do very little. A thorough study from the state of Virginia showed

    No matter how the sites were examined, there was no measurable difference in road noise. All differences at the more distant measurement locations were due simply to the distance effect rather than to any additional mitigating effects of trees, whether measured by planting density, age, height, or average tree diameter.