Schiphol plowed 150 ridges into a park to bounce plane noise back up into the sky

WIRED reported in June 2014 that Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, the fourth-busiest airport in Europe, sits in cold, open flatland where noise can travel unobstructed for miles. Researchers found that things got quieter whenever nearby farmers plowed their fields. The airport then hired landscape artist Paul de Kort to design a park of noise-deflecting ridges, which appeared in the area the year before.

The roughly 150 formations are about 36 feet apart, about the length of the large-wavelength, low-frequency, long-range rumbles; de Kort calls the furrows materialized ground sound. They were built with GPS-guided robot excavators and bounce sound waves from aircraft up into the air instead of toward homes.

Flat open ground lets noise carry for miles, so the ground itself had to be reshaped.

Ridge spacing matched to the low-frequency wavelength is what makes them deflect the hardest-to-block part of aircraft noise.

GPS-guided excavators made it practical to shape the pattern precisely.

Watch for accidental side effects, such as quiet after plowing, and turn them into a deliberate design.

The airport agreed to reduce noise levels by 10 decibels; WIRED said the park gets almost halfway there, and a plan was in the works to nearly double the size of the grooved landscape.