RIDGES: The 150 formations are about 36 feet apart— roughly the length of large- wavelength, low-frequency, long-range rumbles. De Kort calls the furrows “materialized ground sound.” Your Captain Aerial Photography
No one wants to live near a runway, but you definitely don’t want to live by Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. It’s the fourth-busiest airport in Europe, and it’s located in what might be the least soundproof place on Earth: a cold, wide-open flatland where noise can travel unobstructed for miles. Which is why these mysterious-looking formations showed up in the area last year. After researchers discovered that things got quieter whenever nearby farmers plowed their fields, they hired landscape artist Paul de Kort to design a peculiar kind of park. Its pattern of noise-deflecting ridges—built with GPS-guided robot excavators—intercepts the sound waves generated by arriving and departing aircraft and bounces them skyward. The airport has agreed to reduce noise levels tenfold (so, by 10 decibels); this park gets almost halfway there, and there’s a plan in the works to nearly double the size of the grooved landscape.
SOUND DEFLECTION: On average, one plane a minute passes through Schiphol. The noise can ripple out to communities as far away as 20 miles, but these grooves redirect some of it up into the air. Thomas Porostocky
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