Whether we realize we are subjected to it or not, noise pollution can be hazardous to our health in various ways. Our oceans are no longer quiet. Thousands of oil drills, sonars, seismic survey devices, coastal recreational watercraft and shipping vessels are now populating our waters, and that is a serious cause of noise pollution for marine life. As noise gets louder, and especially during sleep, the amygdala activates the body's flight-or-fight response — even if the person isn't aware of it.
Once initiated, this stress response releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol into the body. Some arteries constrict, others dilate, blood pressure rises, digestion slows while sugars and fats flood the bloodstream for quick use by the muscles. The cascading stress response also prompts the creation of harmful molecules that cause oxidative stress and inflammation in the lining of blood vessels.
This dysfunctional endothelium meddles with blood flow and affects numerous other processes that, when impaired, contribute to a range of cardiovascular illnesses, including high blood pressure, plaque build-up in the arteries, obesity and diabetes. Studies on people and mice show that the endothelium doesn't work as well after just a few days of night time airplane noise exposure, suggesting that loud noise isn't a concern only for people already at risk for heart and metabolic problems.
While the data continues to accumulate, untangling cause and effect can be tricky. It's not easy to conduct long-term sleep experiments or to distinguish between the effects of daytime and night time noise, or effects of the noise itself versus the combined effects of noise and air pollution which often go hand-in-hand. The consequences of environmental noise are also tough to parse due to the subjective nature of sound, says Andreas Xyrichis, a health services scientist at King's College in London.
Xyrichis studies hospital intensive care units, where ringing telephones and clattering food dishes can be comforting or counteractive to recovery, depending on the patient. Learn more about the effect noise has on hospital patients.
These harmful materials are called pollutants. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Image Construction Noise Pollution A man working with a jackhammer in a construction site. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom. Encyclopedic Entry Vocabulary. Media Credits The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
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There is somebody with a jackhammer tearing up the street right next to you. There are people playing music super loud. We all kind of think of it as you're walking down the street. This is part of what makes New York cool. But Les Blomberg, founder of the Noise Pollution Clearinghouse, he said to me that if we could see the sound that we generate it would look like litter. It says that we were driving through the countryside throwing things out of the car. These noises both individual and cumulatively have health impacts.
I went to see a group in Paris that measures the noise pollution in the Greater Paris area. One of the things they found is that the loudest areas are on the transportation paths. So roadways, train lines, in the flight paths of airports. People who live in those places have a significantly higher incidence of a long list of diseases. Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure. Sleeping problems, birth related problems.
Inability to pay attention at work. Health consequences, life quality consequences that arise just from being exposed to noise. The people in Paris and the World Health Organization have estimates of how much life is actually lost as a result to sound. It's measured in years and so if you live in a noisy area it actually has an impact on longevity. In the s up in Innwood in the northern part of Manhattan there is a elevated train track that's within a couple hundred feet of the school and it bothers the students.
They can't study. Students on the side of the building that was closest to the tracks by sixth grade were almost a full year behind students on the quieter side of the building in terms of their reading ability.
Every few minutes the teacher would have to stop for 30 seconds because the train was so loud that the students couldn't hear her. The Transit Authority eventually installed rubber pads between the rails.
The school put acoustic sound absorbing acoustic tiles in the ceilings of the classrooms. And remarkably the reading scores then rose again to where they were the same on both sides of the building.
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