Short Wave - Experience The Quietest Place On Earth

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

In a crater at the top of a dormant volcano lies a place so quiet, the ambient sound is right near the threshold of human hearing. Visitors to the crater say they can hear their own heartbeats. This spot, in Haleakalā National Park, has been nicknamed the "quietest place on Earth."Getting there is no small feat--the ascent involves hiking upward through five different climate zones. But the reward is an experience of natural silence that is increasingly difficult to find.Conservationists, park scientists, and communities all over the United States are working to conserve their pristine soundscapes while noise pollution from planes, vehicles, and other human sources increases. Today, Regina G Barber talks with producer Margaret Cirino about the history, culture, and sound of the Haleakalā crater, and why it should matter to all of us.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

I'm Olivia calling in from Scudic Point at Acadia National Park, listening to the sound of the Atlantic Ocean, and you're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers. Regina Barber here with Shortwave producer Margaret Serino. Hey, Margaret. Hey, Gina. excited to be here. I'm excited. You're here with us. So I hear you have a story for us set in the Great Outdoors. Gina, I do. I want to take you on a little sonic journey into nature. You're going to want to want to want to be a story. You're going to want to headphones for this one, if you've got them. Got them on. Got them on right now. We're born listeners. And I think the more we lean into listening, the more happier and fulfilled people we end up being. So that's Matt Mickelson. He's a sound designer. And when

we spoke, he'd just gotten back from Ecuador, where he was recording in the Amazon rainforest. So cool. Yeah. There's so much insect activity there. And all the insects that are vocalizing each have their own little space on the frequency spectrum. So you could hear like just layers and layers and layers of insects at all times throughout the day and the night. So Matt and his team are part of a conservation group. It's called Quiet Parks International. And their mission is to find and preserve the last places in the world where you can escape human-made noise. For two years, Matt was just driving around the U.S. with like all of his.

his recording gear in the trunk of his car. And he racked up something like 95,000 miles. Some of my favorite places that I've been to record include Olympic National Park in northwest Washington State. Northern Minnesota has

something called the Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area, and that is like a phenomenal ecosystem that sounds so beautiful and so unique American Prairie Reserve, which is in northeastern Montana. Anna? All those sounds I'm hearing, I mean, those places are still pretty noisy. I mean, they're gorgeous, but they're definitely noisy. So conservationists will often make a distinction between

natural quiet and pure quiet. So you can have a place that's like full of all these insect and bird noises, but free of human-made noise and that would be naturally quiet. And when I started digging more into this story, there was just one park that I heard mentioned, like, again and again, Halea National Park in Maui. So parts of this park are naturally quiet, but they're also just silent. It's been nicknamed the quietest place on Earth, or at least this one part of it has. It's this crater at the top of a volcano, and it's like 10,000 feet above sea level. But to get down into the crater where that quietest place on Earth,

happens, you have to hike down into the crater about three to four thousand feet. So to understand how quiet this place really is, I talk to Honeygirl Dumon. Aloha, everyone. My name is Honeygirl Dumon, and I'm the interpretation and education specialist here at Haleakala National Park. The center is so quiet. The ambient sound is actually right near the threshold of human hearing. You might experience the wind or the breeze, blowing. You might experience a bee flying by. You will experience hearing your own heartbeat in your ears, you know. So it's, it's, it's pretty awesome getting down into the crater and just getting away from it all. It's such a beautiful place. But this really quiet place might be in

danger from human-made noise. Today on the show, a story about one of the quietest places on Earth and the effort to keep it that way. I'm Regina Barber. I'm Margaret Serino. And you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, Margaret, we've been spending some time this summer checking out the science that's happening in national parks and other public lands. So for this one, you said you're taking us to maybe the quietest place in nature. And that's in a crater on a volcano.

Please tell us more. A number of factors really contribute to that. You know, there's not a lot of wildlife up there making noise, and the crater walls will actually shield a lot of the wind going on. And it's also just really hard to get to. Historically, very few people would travel to the summit, and only for specific purposes. Native Hawaiians consider this place holy.

They call it Vau Akua. Akua is a Hawaiian word for God, So vow is like that realm. So Valakua is going to signify like, oh, that's the realm where the gods live. Wow, it sounds beautiful there. Yeah, it is. And these days, visitors in the park can actually hike through there. And native groups continue to go, too, usually for special occasions.

It could be in the form of coming up for sunrise and doing an only or a chance. A chant could be accompanied by a hula. The hula, people would come to maybe leave an offering. You know, people come up and connect. So how do the sounds at the summit tie into native Hawaiian traditions? Yeah, so as Honeygirl told me, the sounds kind of divide up the year. One season, we'll have the Hawaiian goose, our nene nesting. In the next season, we'll have our uwa-u, our,

Hawaiian petrol. Hawaiians would describe a place by the name of a particular wind or a particular rain. There is a problem, though. The soundscape is threatened by combustion engines or helicopter blades from the tour group circling above. And that's happening to remote places everywhere. There are more planes, cars, and helicopters traveling to places more and more every day. Noise pollution is dead.

Definitely pervasive. And at national parks, there are scientists whose job it is to measure it and figure out how it's changing those places. We have over 550 sites in national parks across the country. That's Ashley Pipkin. She's a scientist with the National Park Service. She's in their natural sounds and night skies division. Our documentation shows that it's likely getting worse with increases in air travel for people, for different tourists. for packages, anything that had to follow the infrastructure of a road, that natural quiet is no longer available.

So before air travel was super common, you could find these places without human noise. But that's just not the case anymore. Okay, so these pockets of peace and quiet are more important than ever. Yeah, in fact, there's a whole network out there of people dedicated to preserving these natural soundscapes. people like our audio guy, Matt Mickelson. It's a really grueling hike, I think. He's gearing up for his first trip to the crater later this fall, but before he visits a new spot, he creates a sonic map of the place.

So he looks at satellite imagery to find nearby noise sources. He also goes through pre-existing noise pollution data, if there is any, and he finds the local air traffic patterns and where all the industrial sites are. And I can kind of like map out. roughly how I think sound travels through an area. Then the actual field recording begins. And that's usually me showing up, standing outside with some microphones and saying, yeah, this is a quiet place.

I think it has a good chance of becoming a quiet park. It involves multiple days of recording sound and taking sound pressure level measurements and then looking at how much noise pollution enters this area. For this trip, Matt's looking for something specific here. 15 minutes completely free of human noise. That means nothing but the natural soundscape. If he finds it, the park would get the organization's seal of approval, a Quiet Park's award. Wait, why 15 minutes? That doesn't sound like much.

Yeah, well, Matt actually told me 15 minutes of quiet is really hard to find. So when you do find a place that has that 15 minute noise-free interval, It's a place that is truly magnificent and worth protecting. Okay, I think I'm getting the full picture now, but soundscape conservation is totally new to me. What would that involve? So at a place like Halea, Kala, that might look like restricting helicopter tours. Ashley Pipkin, that Park Service scientist I talked to, she said it could work a bunch of different ways in different places. So in some parks, they have quiet zones where they request visitors.

to walk peacefully through an area. Some parks install infrastructure to reduce noise. That can include things like quieter pavements, or maybe they'll introduce a shuttle bus system to keep cars to a minimum. That all sounds amazing, but parks have a lot of different resources to protect. How do you convince someone to prioritize sound? Yeah, Gina, I mean, I hear you. Noise pollution could seem really trivial,

but Matt and the other people I talk to, they say that soundscapes are actually really good indicators for the overall health of an ecosystem. Like, if you have a lot of noise pollution, there's probably other kinds of pollution there too. Right. So when you protect a place from one kind of pollution, you're probably more inclined to tackle other kinds as well. Exactly. Honeygirl Dumon, she told me that people in her community are hoping the soundscape conservation could help change what the island's tourism looks like. Prior to the pandemic, Hawaii had been already dealing with it over visitation, meaning the tourism was so great that the resources was taking a hit. And I think it's a mindset, right?

Because for decades, a certain kind of marketing was going on to get people to come to Hawaii. And then you have movies that are like, like, give you a certain kind of stereotypical of what Hawaii is and what it should be and how you should experience it. It's reaching out and changing that marketing strategy. It kind of all boils down to this. We have to reimagine what conservation looks like. When you think of the National Park Service, we don't only protect the physical things, but we're also protecting people's stories, right?

the histories, the culture, and with that comes language. So when you think about how to protect a certain sound, you have to consider how it relates to culture and language and the people and wildlife making a home there. Margaret, thank you for bringing us these field notes from the quietest place on Earth. Gina, I was happy too. My pleasure. This episode was produced and reported by Margaret Serino.

Edited by Gabriel Spitzer with help from Rebecca Ramirez. Rachel Carlson checked the facts. The audio engineer for this episode was Stu Rushfield. I want to give thanks to all of the folks at Halea Kala National Park for their help with this episode. You can find more information about the quietest place on Earth in our show notes. Giselle Grayson is our senior supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our senior director. Anya Grunman is our senior vice president of programming.

I'm Regina Barber. I'm Margaret Serino. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcast from NPR. Thank you.