Land Art Park Significantly Reduces Jet Engine Noise Near Airport

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.

Comments

What a shocker

[smooth wombat]

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.

Re:What a shocker

[Qzukk]

The real shock here is all that prime real estate has been just thrown away when it could have been used to build houses to sell to suckers who then sue the airport for being loud and ruining their enjoyment of their home.

Re:What a shocker

[timrod]

The newsworthy part isn't that they constructed noise-reducing landscape around an airport, but that they did it in a way that is palatable to the general public and reduced noise levels significantly. If you read the article, the point is that the same principle could be applied in the United States to reduce airport noise, as an alternative to having fewer flights, which would impact things like airline ticket prices and flight availability.

The real newsworthy part is that you can get the NIMBY crowd to stop complaining if you dress up things like berms as a public park and "land art" rather than "We're going to build some six-foot-high mounds of dirt to reduce the noise coming from the airport".

Prior Art - Wedge Acoustic Panels

[Irate Engineer]

Wedge foam acoustic panels have been around a long time in sound studios. It's cool that they have rediscovered the idea in dirt and are building the idea into landscape art.

Re:sourceforge significantly reduces crapware

[YoungManKlaus]

maybe you should submit a story then, instead of writing off-topic comments

Re:sourceforge significantly reduces crapware

[mrchaotica]

Stories about that have been getting submitted over and over again since at least yesterday. Dice (which owns both Sourceforge and Slashdot) is suppressing them.

Re:sourceforge significantly reduces crapware

[aardvarkjoe]

Another reason is that it is not news worthy,

An organization that was formerly one of the major hubs of open-source and free software has hijacked the downloads of a major free software project, and is using that to push malware to their users. Do you seriously think that's non-newsworthy, especially to the Slashdot readership? WTF, do you work for Dice too?

or not even true.

Several of the submitted stories have been fairly well-sourced, and I haven't seen anything to suggest that they aren't true.

How about some numbers

[ChrisMaple]

How much is noise reduced, at what frequencies, under what conditions?